When Recognition Becomes a District Value: Cajon Valley's Award-Winning Approach
- Claire Smith
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Cajon Valley Union School District is being honored at the 2026 NSPRA National Seminar in New Orleans with a Golden Achievement Award for their staff recognition program. Hilight is proud to be part of their story.
Many districts have buildings where staff culture is genuinely strong, where teachers celebrate each other and principals find creative ways to acknowledge their teams. But those pockets of culture often live inside individual schools, dependent on the energy of individual leaders. Neighboring buildings in the same district can feel completely different from one another, and staff across the system have no shared way to see or celebrate what is happening beyond their own campus.
Cajon Valley Union School District in El Cajon, California recognized this pattern in their own data. Through districtwide surveys, focus groups, and feedback from leadership meetings, staff shared a clear message: recognition needed to be peer-driven rather than top-down, tied to the district's core values, and visible and easy to share across all schools and departments.
The National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) has named Cajon Valley Union School District a 2026 Golden Achievement Award winner for their Cajon Valley MVP (Mission, Vision, and Promise) Staff Recognition Program, using Hilight as the digital recognition platform. The award will be presented at NSPRA's National Seminar this summer in New Orleans.
The program takes its name from the district's Mission, Vision, and Promise (MVP): Happy Kids, Engaged in Healthy Relationships, on a Path to Gainful Employment. Within that framework, Cajon Valley identified eight specific key promises they call their MVPs, from "Empower Staff" and "Build Community" to "Deliver Impeccable Service" and "Communicate Positively." Every hilight in the program connects to one of those eight promises, making peer recognition a daily habit that also reinforces who Cajon Valley is as a district, not just a program that runs during appreciation week and goes quiet the rest of the year.
Hilight served as the digital platform that made that vision operational across the district. Staff could send recognition to any colleague at any school or department, tagging each hilight to one of the eight MVP promises. The platform created a shared digital space where recognition was visible across the district, rather than siloed inside individual buildings.
Within the first two months of the program's April 2025 launch, over 3,400 hilights had been sent by 15% of Cajon Valley staff to 35% of all employees, with every single school site participating. WD Hall Elementary alone generated over 400 hilights. In the first quarter of the following school year, hilights sent had doubled compared to the same period the prior year. Hilights were also flowing beyond classroom teachers to include district office staff, facilities teams, child nutrition workers, and transportation staff, reaching employees who rarely show up in traditional recognition programs.
For K-12 PR leaders thinking about staff engagement and culture, the staff who keep a district running are often the least visible in recognition efforts. When a program reaches the custodian, the bus driver, and the nutrition worker alongside the classroom teacher, it builds a genuinely unified district culture rather than a school-by-school patchwork.
Survey feedback and staff testimonials from Cajon Valley reflected improved morale, stronger cross-site relationships, and increased feelings of being valued and connected across the system.
The Hilight platform also gives district leadership ongoing data by site, department, and MVP category, turning a culture initiative into a source of operational intelligence that can inform hiring, retention, and leadership development decisions over time.
NSPRA's Golden Achievement Award recognizes outstanding, strategic work in school public relations, communication, and engagement, judged by accredited professionals in the field. For Cajon Valley, it is a reflection of what happens when a district takes recognition seriously enough to build real infrastructure around it, connects that infrastructure to district values, and measures whether it is actually working.
We are proud to see this work honored. The 2026 NSPRA National Seminar is in New Orleans this summer, which happens to be Hilight's home city, and we will be there. If you are attending, come find us. We would love to share what peer recognition built around district values could look like for a community like yours.
See the full list of 2026 NSPRA Golden Achievement Award winners.
Hilight is a district-wide staff recognition platform for K-12 schools. We help districts build year-round peer recognition culture so that the work great teachers and staff do every day gets seen, celebrated, and sustained. Learn more at hilightedu.com.
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