Current mood:

calm

My first PTO meeting
As the title suggests I attended my first PTO meeting last night. They seem much more active than the PTO at Nate's old school. Let me take a moment to say I'm very pleased with this school. They aren't as focused on test scores as the old one was. They have a healthy appreciation for art, music and recess. The money the PTO raises goes toward field trip expenses instead of cramming tests down kids' throats like at the old school. Anyhow, during this meeting I was surprised to find out how many pieces of trash one could exchange for money. Soup labels, Tyson chicken bags, milk tops, UPCs from Pepperidge Farm crackers, and on and on. Today I went through my recycling to find this stuff. I had no idea. You can also raise money for a school by using a specific search engine (www.searchandgive.com). This is a microsoft search engine and a shameless attempt to get us all to stop using Google, but I signed up anyway and do 10 searches a day to raise my limit. The PTO budget for the year is 20K, which sounds like a lot of fundraising to me. There was a woman there from Cali who said they had to raise 250K a year just to keep their heads above water. The fundraising here is pretty much for extras. Another impression I get about this school is that they are very well funded. I think most of the public schools here are doing extremely well, so/because there are very few private schools.