Sacandaga PTA Meeting

November 18, 2003

Minutes of Meeting

 

Attendees

 

Michele Diederich                                 Joanne Schuman

Beth Fritzeen                                          Suzanne Tonsberg

Cathy Conroy                                          Lorraine Bailey

Paula Bailey                                           Lynn Culllen

Anne Cardany                                      ..Linda Plemenik

John Tobiassen                                    Lisa Dangerfield           

                                                                  Cathie Sweeney                             

 

Call to Order

 

 

Approval of Minutes as Posted

 

á      Cathy  Conroy made a motion to repost the minutes  including the fourth page.   The motion was accepted.  Beth will repost the minutes on Wednesday morning.

 

President's Report-Joanne Schuman

 

á      Joanne received a packet regarding an HIV and AIDS awareness program that was geared towards older children.  Mr. Tobiassen said that Pat Tammer is the contact person for that program if it is something we would like to look into.

á      Joanne is checking on licensing so that the school can do Family Movie Nights.  We also need to check on the use of a projector for these events.  Rich Weisen is the point of contact for audio-visual equipment.  We need to check with him on set-up information.  There should not be any expense involved with the set-up of the equipment.

 

Treasurer's Report-Paula Bailey

 

á      The Treasurer's Report was distributed and reviewed by those in attendance.

á      The current account balance is $10,684.

á      The fundraiser was a great success with a profit of $8500.  The returned checks and fees for this event were only $117.50, which should be able to be recouped.

á      We received a school.com check for $12.64

á      The income from the school pictures was $1326.41.  The check for this came addressed to Anne Dutell.  That is something that should be updated and changed.  It should be addressed to the PTA treasurer.

 

Principal's Report-Mr. Tobiassen

 

á      The 5th grade social studies assessments are in and should be available in the next day or two.

á      There is a School Board meeting at Sacandaga on November 24th.

á      The Fine Arts department will be doing an Orff musical instrument presentation for the Board at this meeting. The students will help with the presentation. 

á      The Board meeting will be in the cafeteria and the instrument presentation will be in the library.

á      All is coming along well for Heart Wellness Day.  All kindergarten students will attend school in the morning on this day so they will also benefit from this program.

á      The Scotia Centennial celebration is in the works.  Pete Sheridan is the point of contact for this event.  The Community Dinner on February 7th will kick things off.  Historical Scotia will be celebrated the week of June 5th-11th.  There will be special events daily: art and essay contests, a parade and more.  More information on this event will be coming.  Mr. Tobiassen suggested that maybe the school would like to make a float for the parade.

 

Standing Committee Reports

 

á      Banking (Anne Cardany) No report.  There are plenty of volunteers!!

á      Homeroom Parents (Cathie Sweeney) No Report.

á      Programs (Linda Plemenik) Heart Wellness day is all set.  Chad Curren will be in the morning and Slim Goodbody will be in the afternoon.  All students will get to go through the whole program.  The Circus theme for this year is going to be Patriotism.  The Circus will gear all of their music and routines to this theme and it should be a nice tie in with the Scotia Centennial.  The circus should be calling to notify us of the performers names.  The Circus will be a Friday evening program.  Dorothy Nolie, the District Office leader for BOCES, told Linda that there is a 25% handling fee that goes to BOCES for every program that we do through them.  Mr. Tobiassen mentioned that that fee is usually only for new programs.  Linda said she will check to see if it is a yearly charge or a per program charge.  Mr. Tobiassen said that he would check with the other principals on this issue.

á      Membership (Cathy Conroy) A new membership flyer was sent out and almost all attendees received one.  From that send out, 5 new applications were received.  We discussed that more information on what being a member actually entails may help in raising our membership numbers.  We also discussed that giving a benefit to PTA members may help also.  Possible benefits that were discussed were dinner discounts at the Sacandaga Holiday Dinner, having a raffle at the Holiday Dinner where you get a ticket when you show your PTA membership card.  It was agreed that these were good ideas but next year would be a better time to implement them.

á      Ways and Means (Lisa Dangerfield) There were 40 orders from the fundraiser that were not picked up.  Karen Normington has them at her house and she is distributing them.  We decided that there will be a Spring fundraiser because people really look forward to the chocolate sales at that time of the year.  There will need to be a spring event in order to avoid having too much money in our account.  We could possibly do a float for the Centennial or maybe do the Spring pictures that we discussed at an earlier meeting as an event instead of a fundraiser.  C&H will be used again for the chocolate fundraiser since they did such a good job!

á      Box Tops (Suzanne Tonsberg) The October submission was in on time and we should be receiving a check in December for about $300. We were told that is often mistaken for junk mail so we need to keep an eye out for it.  Suzanne has collected a bunch of donations that will be the prizes for the first Box Tops contest. The first contest will involve each class decorating a shoebox that will be used to collect the Box Tops in.  There will be a racetrack in each classroom that the students will move a racecar on as a way of keeping track of the class collection progress.  The winning class will get either a pizza or ice cream party.  There will also be weekly drawings for prizes.  All children that participate will receive some kind of prize.  Make sure to tell your friends to sign up for the Box Tops Booster Club on line.  Right now there are about 30 people that have signed up.  The school cafeteria is now collecting Box Tops and they will receive double coupons.  Chartwells will also get a % back from what the cafeteria collects.  In order to make the collection process of Box Tops easier Suzanne mentioned that we could just make sure that the labels are correctly clipped (just the label, not the whole box top) and not expired.  There was a suggestion that we could possibly get the Homeroom parents to help in the sorting and clipping. Lynn Cullen mentioned that she could use help with the soup labels.  Suzanne mentioned that there is a soup can container in the cafeteria that would be good to use to collect the soup labels in. Suzanne mentioned that she put a free ad in the Weekly to encourage community members to collect their Box Tops too.  Bob Hanlon put a Box Tops link on the school website and it has lots of information. 

 

Communications  None

 

Sacandaga Holiday Dinner Report Ð Cathie Sweeney and Beth Fritzeen

 

á      The paperwork was submitted and approved for the use of the cafeteria, gym, library entryroom and room 129.  A flyer went out last week announcing the name change and other event information.  A flyer requesting volunteer help will go out this week.  Information has also been put in the Goldenrod.

á      Lorraine Bailey is in charge of the food for this event.  She is working on getting the best deal on paper goods and pizzas right now.  We decided to have carrot sticks and dip instead of salad.  C&H is donating 400 cookies that we will need to bake and Lorraine would also like to bake brownies.

á      The craft projects for the event will be popsicle stick snowflakes that the children will decorate with glitter and glue, and a variety of different holiday shapes that the children will trace, cut out and decorate with various glitters, pompoms, cotton, crayons etc.  There will also be coloring pages for the kindergarten and 1st grade classes to color and sign before the event that will be used to decorate the gym.

á      Cathy Conroy is working on having the childrenÕs artwork on display for decoration and also as a way to help draw more families to the event,

á      Cathy Conroy and Lisa Dangerfield are running SantaÕs Workshop for the evening.   Santa has been arranged and they are still working on finding a suit.  Cathy had her scout troop do drawings to use as decoration for the backdrop behind Santa.  The decorations for this room are pretty well set.  Santa will pass out reindeer food and temporary holiday tattoos (Lisa is ordering these).  They decided to stick with Polaroid pictures and Linda Plemenik is going to make frames for the pictures. 

á      There will be a celebrity reading room where volunteer teachers will read holiday stories from 6pm-8pm.  The celebrities name, time and book selections will be posted outside of the reading room that evening.  A sign-up sheet will be posted this week in the teachers lounge and by their mailboxes.

á      Cathy suggested that we print up a program for the evening so attendees will know the reading schedule, the location of different events and where Santa will be.

á      Joanne suggested that it night be nice to bake the donated cookies at the school so that it smells really good when people come in.  She will check on the logistics of that.

á      Michele is working on the childrens snowman costumes and the PTA will be covering the cost.

á      Lorraine will check with James Brown regarding the kareoke set-up.

 

New Business ÐOpen Floor

 

á      Cathy suggested that the PTA might want to look into purchasing a message board for the school to post PTA and other school activities on. Mr. Tobiassen said that the school had not looked into it, but that it would need to blend into the area since it is so residential.  Joanne stated that it would not be a PTA expenditure since the PTA spent money on the school last year.  Cathy said that she will look into prices and we will talk at a later date.

 

Adjournment

 

 

Respectfully submitted,

Beth Fritzeen

PTA Secretary

 

Attachments:  (for file copy only)

                        Meeting Agenda

                        November TreasurerÕs Report

                        List of Businesses that made donations to the Box Tops Program