Friends of Southwest Charter School
September 15, 2015
Meeting Minutes
Dates to Remember:
- Sept. 16 7/8 Rockaway Beach Overnight Trip (arrive back Sept. 18th)
- Sept. 22 New Parent Orientation 5:45pm – 6:30pm
- Sept. 22 Parent Night 6:30pm – 8:00pm
- Sept. 22 – 24 School Picture Days
- Sept. 25 Emergency Comfort Kits due
- Oct. 2 All School Lunch & Friends of SWCS Parent AM Coffee
- Oct. 6 FoSWCS Meeting, Elephants on Corbett 6:30pm
- Oct. 7 Run for the Arts! at Caruthers Park
Open Forum Community Comments
Aaron is organizing school participation in the September 27th Tilikum Crossing/Sellwood Sunday Parkways. Aaron will send Anne and Marlene information to forward to the community.
The Block Party was a success! Things to consider for next year:
- Setting up at 2:30 in order to be ready for kids coming directly from school at 3 pm.
- Most seemed to like having the party right after school, but we could extend the ending time to help out working parents who can’t make it until after 5pm.
We still need room parents for teachers Courtney and Nesa.
Chinook Book order forms have gone home with the kids. Orders are due October 1st. Last year we made $1248. Our goal is for every family to purchase at least one book.
Sarah Gilmore has designed a new SWCS T-shirt with a chicken logo! Shirts will be $10.
FoSWCS 2015/2016 Board Member Openings
We are looking for about 3 more members for our board. Christina is chair, Elise is treasurer, Liz is secretary, and Melissa is a board member at large focusing much of her efforts on staff appreciation.
By having more board members we can divvy up activities in manageable pieces and responsibility is spread among more people.
We will get our budget to the school board at their October meeting.
Christina would like to have FoSWCS board members rotate attending school board meetings. All that is required is writing up a short report and sending to Anne and Aaron before the meeting. During the board meeting, the Friends representative will highlight Friends activities. This helps keep the school board aware of what we are doing.
FoSWCS Board vote on fund 2014/15 fund allocation
Elise just received the budget numbers from Karen and Nicki. She needs time to sort it out. Then we can decide how to allocate our funds.
Financial Update – Elise
Elise is working on the budget so we can turn into the Board for approval in October.
Final Community Comments
The annual dinner and auction will be Saturday, February 20th at the MAC. She would like to pin down an auction theme by October 1st. One theme Sarah came up with is Portlandia. A Mardi Gras theme was also mentioned.
We’d like to solicit theme ideas from the community. Sarah will ask Marlene/Anne to send out a request for theme ideas. Then we’ll do a SurveyMonkey to have people vote on the contenders.
As Anne will be leaving, Kathy thought it would be fun to bring back some of the founders of SWCS for the auction.
We need to do a better job of inviting alumni to the auction.
Aaron’s term ends in November. We would still like a Board member to come to Friends meetings.
Verde Cocina would like to provide food for conferences. They want us to come to them when we need something. It would be cool to use them for an all-school lunch.
We’re looking for Run for the Arts prizes for the top runners. Try to solicit local companies who are not auction donors.
After Run for the Arts wraps up, Adrienne wants to work on a student directory. It can just be a pdf we can download. No need to print out.
Jen Downer will be doing school portraits this year.
Comfort kits – Sarah M. will get copies of the form from Karen. She will put them in black tubs or Parent Night. Sarah will need help making comfort kits in October.
Next year, it might be easier for parents to just have generic comfort kits that Karen can add to the supply fee. Or, there can be classroom comfort kits that contain a class size number of each item.
Get a Google Docs version of these minutes September 2015 Minutes.
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