President’s Report – 5/9 PTA Meeting

Thanks to the small and mighty group who made it to our May meeting.

Principal Conlon reported on the forced delay of construction project on CLC and music rooms. Due to a necessary soils report, the construction will not take place until next summer. We will move forward with plans to add a STEAM lab to campus for 2016-2017–it will be housed in room 3101 for the first year. Chorus will stay in its current location. The K-1 SDC class will stay at El Morro for another year.

He also projected enrollment for next year to be down to about 590 students. The graduating 5th grade class is approx. 140 students, but it is our largest. Incoming Kindergarten classes have been around 75. We will have more insight into the amount of incoming students shortly, since new student registration is this week. We discussed that the decline in number of students will have an affect on our fundraising, especially the Jogathon.

CAASP testing will be a two week period starting May 15th for 3rd through 5th grades, but the testing is only a small part of the day (not all day for two weeks).

Financials to date were presented by treasurer Laura Jumani. We increased the budget for Reaching Counts to allot for enough popsicles for the end-of-year party. We sold 515 Angels tickets and $625 worth of opportunity tickets for a total net profit of $3,380. To date, with most of the Jogathon funds deposited, we have about $21,000 of unallocated funds that are availavle for other programs.

On that note, we dedicated $15,000 for the set up of the new STEAM lab. We will work with Mr. Conlon and the new science teacher on how these funds are spent.

President Sarah Durand did an overview of the results of the Parent Survey. Parents would most like PTA continue to enhance Science and Technology and Library and Reading, with Arts a close third. The after-school program, Reading Counts, Art Masters, and the Garden rate highest in importance of PTA programs. Overall, parents are happy with the after-school program, but would like more classes at any price point and a better registration experience. High satisfaction with school communications and need for good digital calendar that could be printed or synched with phones. There is not a high awareness of how PTA funds are spent, which led to a discussion that we would put together an end-of-year financial report for families. Priorities for PTA spending were: teacher support, after-school program, library and reading, and field trips/grade level support. We received lots of detailed comments on programs and fundraisers that will be shared with this year and next year’s chairs.

Parliamentarian Alex Cattan presented our proposed reviews to the Bylaws, the revisions were accepted by membership and will be submitted to council and onto the 4th District PTA for approval. We proposed to eliminate the Corresponding Secretary position (which we usually do not fill), increase membership dues to $15 from $10 to account for the higher amount being submitted to State PTA, change the authorized check signer from Historian to Financial Secretary, allow only two executive board members versus five to call both special meetings and association board meetings, and omit language that would allow the financial secretary to remit monies to the treasurer.

The KROC team reported on the success of the program this year. Some ideas for next year, including the potential of making KROC a part of PE or having the PE coaches help run practices, were discussed.

We hope you will all join us for our final meeting of the year on June 13 at 8am in the MPR. We will be reviewing the proposed programs and budget for next year.

I also encourage you all to read this month’s 4th District PTA’s Advocacy Communicator to learn more about the CA teacher shortage.

Thanks,

Sarah Durand
TOW PTA President