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think Hi, you are in the right spot. We're just getting it connected to the computer screen, so just give us A minute 

that There we go. All right, hi, everyone. Can folks that are in the virtual room, can you just do like a thumbs up or something in the chat? If you can hear please, okay, thumbs up, yay. Awesome. All right. Let me just get to my agenda, and then we
so we're in full swing of gathering new members for this school year. We started using give footer last year, and there was an option last year to do an annual recurring donation, which has been great, or one time. And so we have a lot of members who already signed up last year in recurring. We're at 46% of the whole student and staff represented by a PTA member, which is really great. Our goal is 50, so we're still trying to push there. We've been. The way we're pushing this out is through, well, we did a take home flyer. We've been pushing it out through social media avenues, and we did a school messenger. Thank you. We'll continue to push out to try and reach that 50% we have some incentives. We have we have a class prize. We're doing
recess gift basket of some sort. We haven't exactly figured out what's it. It'll be really cool. Yeah. It'll be excellent, yeah. So that'll be for our first prize, and then second prize, we'll get some Chick fil A, which is great, right now, we have Miss Schindler in the lead, with 75% of her class representing.
to lessen the load on the school staff, to email out on our behalf. We used to send out everything through school messenger or through the room bodies, and now we're looking to just send it through give butter, which is our system for signing up for membership. We'll also send out lots of different types of communications, through gives butter, but we'll have PTA newsletters, just reminders on different events, volunteer opportunities, all that good stuff. 
round, yeah. So now that the school year has really, you know, started, and membership has gotten going, I was hesitant to send out a volunteer form at the very beginning of the year. Everyone's overwhelmed. Sports are starting, school is starting. So what we decided was once everything kind of calmed down, and I think it's probably best to wait until the end of September, maybe a little bit before and then through give butter, we will send out, you know, just a volunteer email. It will explain, you know, why we need volunteers, and you know what volunteers can do. It's only things like that. And it will have a link to a form, and we just ask that you fill out. What interests you do? You love art. Maybe you can help with the art show. You know different things like that. So basically, if you're interested in helping with the book fair for the month of March, you know it's a week in March, but like, you know that you'll be available, you put yourself down for that. And it's not like you have to do it. It's more like, then I'll contact you at that point and say, Hey, are you interested? So last year for cultural celebration, right? Carrie, I had a couple people, and so I sent her the emails of the people who said they were interested in the cultural celebration, and then we can reach out to those people and see how they're willing to help. So that is just going to be a simple form that hopefully members will fill out. And then, you know, just so that we can connect with you a little bit more than just sending out our typical sign up genius for different slots, for different events, um, what else? Oh, so it will ask you if you might be in, like, certain committees. It will ask you if you're interested in certain programs or maybe just a specific event, or, like I said, something that you're just interested in and you feel you could bring to the PTA and help out in that capacity. For room buddies, they are a little bit different. This year. They focus on serving as a resource for the classroom teacher. I mean, that's always been, you know, the purpose of a room buddy. But instead of room buddies sending out PTA emails with all the information, we're going to limit that this year, and it will be more of a like, you know, contact information sharing, like we talked about with the directory, which I'll go into in a little bit classroom specific communication, things that the teacher wants to get out for the class, class parties, which will be in the fall, winter and spring, just things like that. We're going to streamline everything through give butter and then school messenger for the school wide, you know, type thing, the classroom directory. Something that I've done since my son, who's in fourth grade, was in kindergarten, is basically a Google spreadsheet. It's private to just the people that are in the classroom, but you let them know, Hey, I'm going to share this. You can put your information down, but people are going to see it. So if you don't want your information there, that's totally fine. And I've had people email me and say, I still want the information, but I don't want to be on the directory, totally fine. So I would just add them when I sent my emails, but it's a great resource for play dates, for birthday parties, you know? And then for me, I would just go in, copy the columns of parent emails and send my room buddy email. Super simple. People go in, add themselves. It's just like a nice, easy way to communicate, and kind of like a directory, but for your own classroom, yes, anything else I'm missing for room buddies, you think of anything? No, so the 
of the budget is that we are aiming for basically a zero balance budget. So we want to spend what we bring in, only bring in, I feel only bringing what we need to spend, and only spend what we're bringing. So let's not overspend, etc. It did a little hard in the past, because we're currently sitting on a good chunk of change in our savings account. We're working to send that down overnight. So that started last year, actually, before two years ago, we started by basically making some big donations to the school. The first one was a bunch of library books. This one needs more. Don't be wrong. Look around this little energy box, but we did a lot. We did a very good job. Last year, Mr. S, Mr. Came to us with the proposal to upgrade the audio visual equipment that they used for announcements and all the other media stuff that they did with the kids. And so we did that last year. Basically we settled on is that every year we're leaving a capital expense line item for $8,000 and we're going to be asking the teachers and staff to basically, if 

there's something that you're looking at doing that's kind of a big ask, like put together a proposal, come talk to the PTA, like we're going to fund something, like we got to send it. So let's, let's do it. That's where you feel that that's for otherwise, just a pretty standard budget sheet, right? We've got income on one side. We've got the expenses on other. Try to line up as best as we could. I try to make it a little more clear so which things are which and where they're coming from, what they're for. So like, you'll see, like, we get a lot of money in Derby sponsorship, like, from all the different businesses, even the individuals that decide yes, we're going to get money out of school, we're doing it through the Stoneleigh derby. Awesome. There is some expenses to the Derby, but that's minimal compared to what we're we're bringing in. Anyway, if there any questions in the budget, I can answer them. Otherwise, we did a lot of work on it. Was a board. I'm pretty happy with it compared to where things were last year. We basically, I went through, I increased, we increased some things that people clearly needed more funding to, like, get done. But then also, we're really working really hard this year to buckle down, and we're not going to be sending past our approved amount.
do want to mention one thing that if you're looking at this and you're a little confused about the Scholastic Book Fair is really weird. We essentially have to bring in. We bring in this we bring in a bunch of cash, and then we owe some of the cash back to right, and then it comes into the PTA account, and then we pay some of the cash back to Scholastic for the difference in the books, and then we pay the rest of the difference to or give it to the library as A credit, and they can purchase
that has volunteered. It's hard, right? So we have our teacher who helps us out, and then there's morning announcements, and he helps with those too, and it's just a lot in the morning. Or, you know, maybe a teacher that does kiss and go line, and they can't be there for that. So if we could get parents to volunteer for that, I know we've had PTA presidents that have done it,
question about that capital stuff. I know that as a parent of a fourth and first grader, I've walked into several classrooms, and when there is a nice classroom rug, you make notice of it. And when there is not, you also make notice of that and so, and I also know they're very expensive, those Lakeshore like colored rugs that are, I think, in maybe every classroom in the school. But as we were talking about sort of a welcome rug, I was also just thinking about an audit of like which have seen better days and which are feeling fresh. Yeah. 

you want to talk through Yeah real quick, because I can send this out so they'll come also at some point to the committee leads. In an email this year I put together for each of the different committees or program leads for spending money, these expense tracking spreadsheets in our Google Drive. So we're going to put everything in there. There's instructions. The calculations will auto calculate for you your approved budget is there was pretty was, you know, maybe approved, but now it is approved. Hanging in there for you, you'll be able to see kind of, throughout the year, basically, where you're at, if you need to be at requesting for money, maybe re looking at what you're doing, making sure that we're actually paying attention to what we're spending when we're spending it. Yes, we can go over that more also at the next training. Now that the budget is approved, I will go through there are some reimbursement requests that have been sitting there, and I will go through those this week and get the checks sent out. And yeah, there's a new option in the online forum, if you'd rather pick up your check in person, because you're home to the meeting, you're going to see me, or you just want to meet up with me, that's fine, I don't have the mail.