PVE PTO Minutes

Tuesday, November 11, 2009

In attendance: Kirsten Wujek, Debbi Kuller, Carolyn Goebel, Chris Squier, Jennifer Pratt, Rebecca Cunningham, Becky Culp, Molly Griffin, Chad Smith, Mike Schaefer

President: Thanks to all for getting articles into the newsletter. Ginger really appreciates it.

The November ZCS School Board meeting recap:

• An Eagle Scout was honored.
• The state championship boys’ Tennis doubles team was honored as well as the state championship boys’ Soccer team.
• ZWest principal talked about ZWest initiatives.
• A consultant gave an update on construction at the high school
• A class size report was given. Stonegate and ZCHS are talking about future capacity issues that may occur in the longer term (2+ years from now).
• The school corporation is buying a pickup truck for $22k.

Vice-President:

Beautification: The beautification weekend has been postponed until the spring. Spring will be a better time to plant perennials. In addition, the Zionsville School Corporation staff needed to work the weekend was not available on November 7th.

Artist in Residence: The grant for an artist in residence has been submitted to ZEF. Becky suggested that Tri Kappa be approached as a possible grant source if the ZEF grant is denied. They have donated in the past to a similar program for Eagle Elementary and provided and Artist in Residence grant to ZWMS in the amount of $3,000 last year.

Secretary: The minutes from the September meeting were approved. Debbi Kuller motioned to approve them and it was seconded by Becky Culp. Jennifer asked if anyone printing a program status report to forward that report electronically to her at jenjpratt@yahoo.com. This way, key information can be copied without being retyped (I’m getting spoiled by the wonderful handouts).

Treasurer: Our fundraising has done well. We are planning to do a spring book fair. Molly is currently looking at the Scholastic catalog to see what we’d use the funds for. She has entered the box tops numbers into the budget. Based upon current projections, we are going to have a surplus of $5k. Molly is working with Chad to come up with a list of items for which the money could be used.

The PTO Board is going to invite Mr. Miller to come to a PTO meeting and show what has been purchased with PTO funds. We will be asking other teachers to do the same so what we can see the types of programs or classroom tools our fundraising has enabled.

Teacher grants are now coming in.

We will not be doing the Amazon Warehouse fundraiser. The hours required do not work with the school schedule of parents with children in the elementary grades (e.g. start time before 9AM).

Student Services: The food drive is ongoing and doing well. We have plenty of boxes to transport the items and are still planning on the football players to come on Friday and help load them.

Fundraising:

Labels for Education: The fall program is complete. 14,474 box tops were turned in from the September competition, which means we earned $1447! We already turned in $1285 worth from last spring so our check should be $2,732. We expect the check to come in December. The next box top competition will be in February. We are collecting the UPC from all the Goldfish crackers used in the cafeteria, which should amount to 300-400 per month. Today alone, volunteers collected 445 labels from lunch. Thanks to Dawn Firmani, Dawn Rauk, Kirstin Wujek, Kristen Jones, Ann Cash, Yvette Mybeck, Ellen Schellhause, and Angie Campbell for counting, cutting and collecting these at lunch today. You are wonderful!!

The Target check arrived – total of $1607.15. They have a new policy to send only one check per year so the rest of this year’s money will come next fall.

Parents who enrolled their Marsh Fresh Idea card totaled 472. Marsh points for September were 5,988. The bonus points awarded for extra things we did amounted to 35,000. So, in December we will have 40,988 points plus what we earn in Oct. and Nov. to use towards a catalog purchase.

The Campbell Soup label competition started 10/5. Total points so far = 5,128. We are also collecting soup labels off all the can submitted for the food drive.

Staff Services: The fall luncheon went really well and was way under budget thanks to all the volunteers who baked and donated food. The teachers liked the “get it and go” aspect.

Newsletter: Please have articles submitted to Ginger Lenig by the 20^th of each month.

Publicity: Andrea will be taking pictures of the Discovery Center on Thursday so that it can be featured in next week’s newsletter. This week she will also capture the football team helping with the food drive.

New Business:

It was suggested that in memoriam to Kate Farley that the PTO raise money to donate to Camp Riley. There was discussion regarding soliciting donations for this cause for the next movie night ($5 suggestion). There was a suggestion to contact Martha Farley to see if this is okay.

Principal Chad Smith:

• Thanks to all for surpassing our budget on fundraising!
• Staff lunch was great. It was particularly nice that the food selection focused on wellness.
• The Book Fair was great – we had tons of volunteers. Chad again wore the pink gorilla suit!
• Tomorrow will be the Veterans Day Assembly. Lieutenant Colonel Rude is coming in to talk. He is a professor of military science for IUPUI and trains all the area ROTC. He will be reading a letter from the son of our librarian who is in Iraq.
• The Literacy Lab just opened and is themed for fall and farming. We are hoping to grow it.
• Movie Night was successful. Next time we will use the Discovery Center as well.
• Thanks to Ginger for her efforts on the newsletter and for being so patient with late/last minute submissions.

Guest Speaker: Mike Schaefer

ZCS CFO Mike Schaefer gave a presentation on state revenues and impact it has on the school budget. Check the corporation website for future information.

Reminder: Next PTO meeting is December. 1st at 9:15 AM.