Hello and welcome back for the second part of the school year! December was a busy time, wrapping up the first semester. The book fair was quite a success and its being partnered up with the 5th grade Movie Night was a lot of fun! We owe a huge thank you to Suruchi Kaul for pulling the book fair together and making it run smoothly! Hopefully you all were able to check off a few gifts while the kids were watching the movie. As you will see in our Treasurer’s notes we are on track financially, but still have a way to go to reaching our final bugetary goals.
As many of us embark on our New Year’s resolutions for the year we are also turning our attention to the winter and spring semester and our goals as an organization. We hope that the auction, which will happen next month, will be a huge success. We have lots of great donations and look forward to getting it started. A huge thank you is in order for Kelly Fatman who has once again been the force behind putting together the event. We also look forward to seeing everyone at our winter movie later this month and the annual BINGO night next month as well as a parents night out in the early spring.
We also encourage all to join any of our weekly meetings to provide your input for the remainder of this year as well as looking toward the future year!
The PTO budget is in good shape as we close out 2013. Donations continue to trickle in for the annual campaign. To-date, 91 families have contributed to the effort. The total money raised stands at $15,948. While we’ve fallen short on our participation goal, we have exceeded our monetary goal of $15,000. Thank you so much to all those who have donated! In addition to the campaign, the PTO income has been helped by hugely successful events, like the Halloween Party and the Book Fair. The party netted $3,466, exceeding expectations, and the book fair netted $1,607, again exceeding expectations. School photo income held steady with $1,391 in profit, which is consistent with past years. From our Just Next Door shopping event, the PTO earned $106, which is down almost 50% from last year. Williams Wear continues to be a strong fundraiser for the organization, with close to $500 in net income to this point. We continue to receive benefits from our online shopping as well. Our Amazon income to-date has been small, but we expect benefits from the holiday months to be significant. In the coming months, we look to the movie night and on-line auction to be important fundraisers for making out the remainder of the expected income.
On the spending side, the PTO has funded $1,628 in teacher and staff discretionary spending. Creative Arts and Sciences spending is up to $6,893, which has funded the Potato Hill Poetry event for the second grade, the Museum of Science Traveling program, Wingmasters for grades three and five, Bugsworks for grade 1 and the Discovery Museums Traveling Science Workshop for the kindergartners. The PTO also handed out mini-grants at the end of 2013. There were 11 grants distributed totaling $3,600. We expect that those purchases and reimbursements will be made over the next month or so. Finally, the PTO made its second (of 2) payment of $1900 to the school to subsidize field trips. As always, the PTO is committed to ensuring all money raised is put to good use.
