February 2009

You haven’t heard from us in a while!

In December and January are traditionally slow months for our PTO. We did not have a December meeting and the January meeting was devoted to the bond issue.

Although we did not meet during those two months I do have a few things to pass along.

Our holiday giving events were once again successful. Thanks to all who participated in the Giving Tree, Change for a Change and Operation Thank You.

In January we assembled all of the Box Tops for Education that were received September thru January. The Box Tops were sent in earlier this week and the school can look forward to receiving a check for about 560.00. You all contributed over 5200 box tops!

Look for more news coming soon on our Box Top Drive for Spring!

Now that the holidays are over things will pick up for us. Here is what is coming…

Cookie Dough Sale – By now you have already seen our cookie dough fliers, and the last day to order has passed. Profit made on the sale of cookie dough will go to funding the Coyote Howl.

Thank you very much to Kristie Bayless for coordinating this sale. Kristie has already done a lot of work getting the flyers together and that was only the beginning! Now she has even more to do counting money, making a final order and getting the cookies to us!

Educational Extravaganza - You can’t help but have heard of the Extravaganza and I am sure many of you are in the thick of helping your kids get the things they need together to complete their projects!

The Extravaganza is being coordinated this year by Irma Madrigal. Again, she has done a lot to get ready for this event and she isn’t done yet!

Last year we had an unusual occurrence on the day that the student evaluations were done, we had only a small number of volunteer evaluators. This was unusual because in the past we have always had so many. The volunteers did a great job and managed to get to every student evaluated!

This year please consider showing up to help with the evaluations. Irma will let us know how much help she needs beyond what committed volunteers she has.

School Bond – Don’t forget to send in your ballot. For more information on the bond go to www.ksd.org.

PTO Purchases – the school is still in the process of receiving and paying for the “Smart Boards” budgeted to be purchased this year.

The Coyote Howl – This is our biggest event to tackle. We will let you know more as we do about what we will need for this year and how we plan to get everything done.

Thanks to all of you for all you do to help out. I know for certain our teachers appreciate it!

E-mail us with any questions, concerns, ideas or suggestions.

Ridge View PTO News

November 2008

It sure has been a fun and successful start to the school year for the PTO. First, I want to thank those of you who have approached me and other members of the board to express your encouragement and support. I also want to express gratitude to each of our parents who have volunteered and supported us on projects and events, big and small. Additionally, it was great to see so many first-time attendees at our October Board Meeting. Finally a big thank you to our students whose outstanding performance in the Jog-A-Thon has earned the school a very large sum of money in donations!

Jog-A-Thon
As hinted at above, the donations earned at this year’s Jog-A-Thon were tremendous. The total donation for this year’s Jog-a-thon is $17,104.35. Pretty impressive, right? Thanks to everyone who helped in the planning, preparation and execution of this event! Of course thanks to each of you parents pledged money to our students. In celebration of our student’s efforts the PTO is planning a small party for each classroom.

Amount earned by each student has been calculated and prizes are in the process of being ordered.

Fun Jog-a-Thon Trivia:

Most Laps Run by a single student: 53

Most money earned by a single student: $345

Number of kids who earned a water bottle: 261

Number of kids who earned medals: 144

Number of kids who earned sports bags: 52 Number of kids who earned $10 gift cards: 10

Number of kids who earned $25 gift cards: 2

Additionally, we have a winner to our Jog-a-thon poster contest. Jenna Cummings. Jenna’s winning art will be hung on the wall with the winners from previous years. Jenna will receive a 16x20 canvas reproduction of her work. Congratulations Jenna!

T-Shirt & Sweatshirt Sales
The 2008-2009 T-shirt/sweatshirt sale is completed. This year the PTO sold about 259 t-shirts and 155 sweatshirts. There are still a few youth small t-shirts left and youth medium sweatshirts left. If anyone is interested in purchasing any of these, just send a note to school addressed to the PTO and we will get your request together and send it home with your child. Remember t-shirts are $10 and sweats are $20.

Skate Night
Hey everyone! Our next Ridge View Skate Night is being held on November 18th. When you have a student who is in their 5th year at Ridge View you tend to forget people new to the school don’t always know what you are talking about, as is the case with skate night. So what I neglected to tell everyone in our last newsletter was exactly what skate night is.
Skate night is held at the Rollarena in Richland. It is a two hour slot of time where Ridge View has the roller skating rink all to ourselves! Only parents and elementary school age kids and younger are allowed to skate during skate night. The cost is $4 including skates. The Rollarena gives $1 for each student who attends back to the PTO.
The Rollarena gives free pizza and pop to the class that has the most students in attendance.
The PTO does not make a ton of money out of this event, but that’s okay because the kids have a blast!

Donuts with Dad
We think Donuts with Dad was pretty successful this year. The weather was nice and we had LOTS of Dads show up. Everyone seemed to have a good time. It was fun to see the Dads with their kids and I think a lot of Dads had a good time visiting with each other too!
Look forward to Muffins with Mom coming in the spring. And mom’s start working on the Dads now because we will be looking for Dads to volunteer to run this event for the moms!

Corporate Sponsors
Do you ever wonder what we get from collecting all of those soup labels? The soup labels are not redeemable for cash like the Box Tops, but the school does get points to shop with out of the Campbell’s catalog. Recently we had a teacher whose DVD player broke. We were able to order her a new one using soup from the soup labels you contributed. So Thanks! And keep them coming.

Ridge View Directory
Wasn’t that quick? Thanks to Renee Kruger for putting the directory together in record time! I saw the stack of paper she had to work with and I can tell you it was a big stack! Also thanks to Peyton Kruger for her wonderful artwork on the cover.

Teacher Appreciation
As is our tradition we will be serving lunch to our teachers on November 21st. This is during conference time. Wendy Knight has graciously volunteered to pull this luncheon together. If you mentioned an interest in helping out with teacher appreciation, you may be hearing from Wendy.

Scholastic Book Fair
Sometimes I think the parents are more excited about the book fair than the kids! I get tons of parents asking if we are going to have a book fair. Of course we are going to have a book fair! The book fair will be held during the week of school conferences. I don’t have the exact dates, but you can be sure we will let you know! By the way, we owe LeAnn Anderson so many thanks for all of the work she has put into the book fairs over the past several years! So thank you LeAnn. Again if you ever mentioned an interest in helping out with the book fair, you may be hearing from LeAnn.

Goodness Weeks
A newer tradition of ours has become goodness weeks. We celebrate goodness week during the three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is a time where we like to bring out the willingness and give the opportunity to our students to “give back”.
In the past we have collected change for a week and donated it to a worthy cause. We had a week where students wrote nice notes to each other or whomever they wanted to, including our troops.
So I would like to get three people who would like to take one of the weeks and come up with something to do and then be in charge of that activity.
The weeks are
Dec 1-5
Dec 8-12
Dec15-19

If you could submit your idea and reply to ridgeviewpto1@verizon.net in the next week or two that would be great. Ideas..DO NOT have to be about collecting money.
Please be aware that Mrs. Butler will have the final say on which projects we can do.
Also, don’t confuse this with the “Giving Tree” which is coordinated by Mrs. Lorenz in the library.