General Meeting Minutes - March 6, 2024

Board members in attendance: Hadar Ferris (chair), Jen Kallam (co-chair), Korrin Fyall (co-secretary), Heather Vergason (treasurer), Roxie Anderson (co-treasurer) 

Parents in attendance: Tamra McVey, Shannon Moorman, Jen Crosby

Hadar called the meeting to order at 6:07pm.  

Approval of minutes from 2/7/24: Hadar motioned to approve minutes. Jen Kallam seconded. Minutes approved.  

PRINCIPAL’S CORNER
Ms. Raboli was unable to attend

TREASURER REPORT
Chase account: $16,520.34
BottleDrop: $564.78
PayPal: $1,648.49

These totals do not reflect expenditures from Bingo Night or Eighty’s Dance; receipts are needed.

NEW BUSINESS 

Al’s Spring Baskets: Jen will have fliers in backpacks next week on Thursday, March 14th and have the google doc order form up and running. The PAC will sell spring baskets 10” or 12” and will earn $13 on each basket sold. Also available: Gift cards; PAC earns $5 for every $25 sold. All proceeds benefit the school community garden. Korrin noted that we will need to have a reserve for all funds earned for the garden.  

Read-a-Thon: The read-a-thon completed and earned $1,468; last-minute checks need to be tallied. 

1st place: Declan (6th grade) Each kid with the highest donation in their class earned a $5 certificate to the book fair next week. Kids that turned in a Book Bingo with at least 10 squares completed earn a free dress certificate. 

Jen raised the concern that the funds earned will cover only the software fee of $1,200 and the sign up fee for OBOB; not any additional expenses. For OBOB, our library provides one copy of each book in each category (6th-8th and 3rd-5th). Jen and Shannon discovered a grant they can apply for, but potentially SCS, not PAC, must apply. Fundraiser needs better advertising; PAC could invest in a large vinyl banner to reuse each year, such as “Read-a-Thon Happening Now,” with the QR Codes for our website and PayPal. Only about eight families contributed funds earned. 

Question raised: Can we use Sherwood district software for the library, to save on cost?
Answer: Switching to a different software is not feasible because of the time and expense.   

OBOB Regionals: We have enough volunteers for the middle school regionals to be held this weekend, 3/9/24, 8am to 1pm; but we may need one more parent volunteer for the following weekend’s elementary school regionals, 3/16/24. 

Next SCS Board Meeting: Heather to attend the March 20, 2024 meeting. Last month at the SCS board meeting, Hadar asked the school to pay for half of the library software. There has been no response from the board. Heather will ask again at the March 20 meeting, and ask who is responsible for district fees. 

Harvest Festival: We will be taking over the harvest festival and need to find at least two co-coordinators and a good size team of volunteers. Hadar has already added the request to the newsletter for parents to sign-up. We will also have a sign-up at the Celebration of Learning event. Need to have a good committee established to meet over the summer. 

Korrin noted that due to this and other events planned for the following year, the PAC board should work to finalize a 2024-2025 event calendar and review with the school, possibly have dates approved and booked with the church before end of this school year. This will help establish recurring events for the incoming PAC board. 

School garden: A business is willing to match funds raised for the garden. Hadar is asking for $500 added to the budget for this garden. Will return to this matter later in the meeting. 

See’s Candy: It was discussed and determined we would not do the See’s Candy fundraiser this year, and focus on the spring basket fundraiser. 

Teacher/staff luncheon updates: Apr 5 – still need 2nd grade host. May 3rd - 1st and Kinder will host; Jen Kallam and Korrin Fyall wil coordinate. Korrin will set up on the day of the event. 

Book Fair: We will have the uniform closet at the book fair. The fair runs March 11-14; volunteers are still needed. Will push this in Thursday's email to families.  

Dining Night Out: The Chipotle DNO on 2/21/24 raised $470.65. Our next dining night out is Panera Bread, Sherwood. 

Teacher Appreciation: Jen coordinating. Her theme is cooking with the large end gift to teachers being a cookbook/recipe from the kids in their class. Each kid will get a large 7”x5” card to fill out and return. Jen will provide a flier explaining to parents how the recipe card will work. Plans to have these go home with kids a few weeks before teachers appreciation week in order to organize. Will have a showering teachers with gifts day but have it rotate for the teachers with only a few each of the four days getting to wear the Golden Chef’s Hat. These days will be provided to parents in advance so the kids can shower their teachers with notes of appreciation and gifts. Discussed making all the recipes available in some format for the whole staff possibly in a PDF book. Also suggested to do gift baskets with sign-up genius by class.  

Increase to Budget: Hadar moved to approve a budget for the garden of $500 and Shannon second. Table the motion to discuss reallocating the funds from last year. Per review of the June 2023 minutes there was an estimated excess available, but per review of final 2023 numbers this could not be confirmed. Roxie is to look further into where our budget is at for this year. KOrrin noted that we could approve knowing that we have enough in reserve to cover the start-up costs of the garden. Hadar noted that her goal is to have it mostly donated and not to need the full $500, but that $500 is the estimated cost if no donations are received. A couple of potential donation avenues were discussed and Hadar is going to look further into the suggestions, but she does have a few potentials at the moment.

Roxie noted that we do need to increase the budget of the Bingo night as costs were higher than expected. Therefore, Korrin motioned to increase the overall budget by $600 to cover the new school garden and additional costs for the community events held. Hadar second the motion. Discussed that there was adequate cash to handle the increase and put it to vote. The vote was unanimous and the budget increase approved.


ADDITIONAL ITEMS AND FEEDBACK - 

Storage: Korrin asked that at next month’s meeting in April we have time allotted to discuss storage; there is no room for the bingo night supplies, and we will have no room for the harvest festival supplies.

Additional library discussion: Shannon expressed concern for the library; it is almost 100% funded through parent donations (primarily a handful of families), with the exception of a few years with the administration buying some booksets. The school does not promote the library fundraisers; some of the teachers said the fundraiser was not enough to help the students get excited. Part of the issue is that with the library funds raised going to the $1,200 software, they were unable to offer class pizza parties and additional Book Fair $5 coupons as they had in years past.

Shannon raised the issue of how to handle the library moving forward:

• Does the school board want the school to have a library?
• Why are we paying a district fee and who is in charge of district fees? 
• The library needs a software system, and the current laptop soon will not be able to run the software.  
  

Upcoming events -
March 11-14: Scholastic Book Fair (3:30pm-4:30pm each day)
April 3: PAC General Meeting (6pm)
April 5: Staff/Teacher Luncheon (2nd Grade Host)
April 16: Dining Night Out: Panera Bread (4pm-8pm)

Meeting adjourned at 8:23 pm.