Local businesses and groups team to honor educators

This month, Main Street El Dorado and the El Dorado/ Union County Chamber of Commerce teamed with LSB Industries and Lapis Energy for a four week campaign to honor local childhood educators.

Lauren Berry, VP of external affairs at Lapis, said the company reached out for the partnership as part of a holiday campaign “celebrating educators, with a particular focus on early childhood education.” LSB and Lapis funded the campaign while MSE and the Chamber took on different sections of it.

Main Street El Dorado’s part was a Facebook campaign encouraging people to shout-out their favorite childhood educator. The teacher with the most shout-outs at the end of the week was given a $200 MSE gift card for downtown shopping.

“We asked people to comment on why they nominated the person and went off likes and nominations as far as voting each week,” said Beth Brumley, executive director at MSE. The contest was county-wide.

“We got a really good response to it,” she continued.

The 4 awardees were Larry D. Yarbrough at West Side Christian School, Allison Harrison Lockwood at Hugh Goodwin Elementary School, Candance Carr Black at First Baptist Church Child Learning Center, and Tia Johnson at Westside Daycare.

Berry said the social media portion of the campaign resulted in over three hundred shout-outs from people honoring their favorite educators.

The partnership with the Chamber was an even more straightforward show of appreciation via donuts. Last week, Chamber VP of membership and events Karen Hicks delivered donuts from Spudnut Shoppe to all area day cares and pre-K and elementary schools throughout last week.

The campaign will conclude with a coffee at PJ’s for area educators; Berry said further details on that will be released by schools to educators today.

Berry said the idea behind the campaign was simply to spread holiday cheer to local

educators.

“The holidays in El Dorado are magical. The community goes all out, from the Christmas parade to Santa on the Square. Main Street El Dorado and the Chamber of Commerce do an amazing job pulling all this together, and we wanted to build on this work with a special celebration of early childhood educators,” Berry said.

David Kimmel, director of communications at LSB Industries, agreed.

“We are a part of this vibrant community. Our people live, work and are an integral part of the fabric of the El Dorado community and we want to share in the excitement of the holidays, while also recognizing those who are doing so much to make sure our children are getting the best possible education.”