The Austin-based clothing company Dude Be Nice focused on promoting positivity and general niceness teamed up with H-E-B to give a special Frisco teacher a surprise.
Earlier this year, Brent Camalich, CEO of Dude Be Nice got in touch with students at Lone Star High School in Frisco in an effort to highlight people who are making a positive impact in their communities. When he asked if someone on the campus was in need of recognition, both the kids and school staff thought of Matthew Cobb, a history class teacher.
Mr. Cobb has only been teaching for two years at Lone Star, yet in that time he’s gained the trust and respect of his students and peers. “Every student he has had can say something great about him,” said senior student Allie in the Dude Be Nice video that documented the whole inspirational scheme. “He always put in, like, a lot of effort towards each individual person. For everybody that’s a senior, he wrote a (personalized) letter.”
This has been a particularly difficult year for Mr. Cobb and Lone Star High School as a whole. In the span of a few months, the school lost two students, both in Cobb’s rosters. “I’ve been teaching eleven years,” said Matt Ray, another teacher at LNHS, “I’ve had zero and he had two in his second year teaching.”
Shannon Charbonneau, mother of one of Cobb’s students that passed away participated in the Dude Be Nice intervention and shared how much it meant when Cobb reached out to her family. “A lot of people are nice, a lot of people are kind. But there’s a special kind of nice,” she said referring to Cobb.
So Camalich alongside the community and H-E-B rolled up their sleeves and planned a surprise love bomb on their favorite teacher. They called him for a fake end-of-the-year district debrief, and little by little, students interrupted the meeting with messages they wrote and bags full of H-E-B presents until Camalich himself stepped in to explain what was going on.
In addition to a $2,500 donation to the school in Cobb’s name, H-E-B Frisco and Dude Be Nice awarded Cobb with $2,500 worth of gift cards to stock up the pantry at his new home, before the kids took him for a go-kart ride, one of Cobb’s wishes for his birthday.
“I wasn’t the most well-behaved student but I had teachers and I had coaches along the way that wouldn’t give up, they helped me, they’d coached me, they’d teach me, they’d mentored me,” said Cobb, unaware of the hidden cameras in the office. “So I wanted to be that for these kids.”
In case you missed it, here's Local Profile's report on this unconventional school in Frisco.
