Spring at CCE PTA

We are gearing up to our last semester of school and have some new & exciting ways to celebrate Spring here at CCE! New items available at the office and PTA Store include Smencils and Y-Ties! These are neat items for under $5 and are available in many colors and scents. April 26- 29th is Arts Extravaganza week at CCE. Tuesday and Thursday we have Art Fair from 6-8pm where you can view your child's artwork around the building. Then on Friday night, we have Arts Extravaganza where we have food, vendors and art projects for kids of all ages. Come join us at the Marshmallow house building table that LearningRX will have there! We will be having a new Spirit Night with Brucci's at the corner of Hodges & Beach Blvd on May 10th from 5-9pm. Come join us for a great evening of fun & food! We have also planned an awesome year end Family Fun Event at Adventure Landing! June 9th from 5:30 - 8:30pm you can get unlimited Mini Golf, Laser Tag, Go-Karts, Wacky Worm & Frog Hopper for a great price. Look for your flyer in your student's home/school folder to purchase your tickets.

Looking for you!

We are looking for new board members for the 2011-12 school year. We have numerous positions open and would like to welcome you to take on any portion of a task from 1 hour of your time to a year-long commitment. Whatever you can provide, we have something to fit your interests & time.

Board positions that are open include:

• Corporate Contributions
• Historian
• Membership
• Volunteer Coordinator
• Reflections
• Business Partnerships
• Treasurer
• Hospitality (Boo Hoo Breakfast, Faculty Breakfast)
• Ways & Means (Fundraising)

So many of these positions are key to our ability to provide strong, solid programs to the students such as this year's bullying assembly, funding for books for the reading programs like Battle of the Books, Arts Extravaganza, Rockets and Recorders for Science and Music. Please consider donating any amount of time you can offer to help us keep these going. "Job descriptions" are noted below for your reference:

Business Partnerships - This is a new role to our group but a very important one. This person uses their skill at sales & marketing to help us gather business sponsors through coupons, on-site events, and monetary donations that help cover the costs of the programs the PTA provides all year long. We honor those business partners on our PTA website and make sure we provide visibility to them for their donations. This person also is a key contact for other PTA teams who need business sponsor coupons and goodies throughout the year so that we don't hit up one company or another multiple times unfairly.

Corporate Contributions - This is related to the Box Tops, ink cartridge, cell phone contests we have. About 3 times a year we send in all those Box Tops and so on to the vendors who send us back a check to help us fund those important programs mentioned above. This is a job that can often be done at home on your schedule with some interaction at the school during the day or during extended day for pick up of those products.

Historian - this position creates the Scrapbook we keep for each year's events. Taking pictures at the events is often a key method for getting those memories but we have the digital camera and lots of people to help make that happen even if you prefer to do the scrapbook itself.

Hospitality - This team helps provide the very important Boo Hoo Breakfast for our incoming kindergarten parents as well as key appreciation breakfasts for volunteers and faculty throughout the year. We have 1 team member now but need to locate a 2nd person to help make these events more manageable.

Membership - This team has 2 people on it but we need additional hands to get through that crunch at the beginning of the school year. This team coordinates the stuffing of membership packets prior to the beginning of the school year as well as handling the classroom parties for membership contests we hold during September. The work this team does often requires daytime onsite time from the team members.

Reflections - This activity is a focused event that occurs during late Fall into January. Reflections is an artistic contest for the students of CCE related to a theme determined by the DCC Reflections committee. The students create their artistic product related to the theme and the person who chairs this event coordinates the incoming Reflections contest materials, the final decisions and the communication of the winners to the CCE parents in January. We have a full binder of "how to" material to help complete this event by our current chair so if you take this on, you won't be at a loss for what to do and when to do it.

Treasurer - This is a key position in our Executive Board that requires check signing, checkbook balancing (monthly), treasury updates to the board at our meetings, and key time commitments during Carnival for deposit handling. This person takes deposits to the bank for us and handles verification of all committee deposits provided by other teams during events that they chair (such as Valentine's Dance, Family Night Dinners, etc). If you have a knack for numbers and time to support us in this role, please let us know.

Volunteer Coordinators - We have 2 members on this committee but need 2 more to complete the team. These individuals help us all year long by coordinating our volunteer needs through emails, phone calls & in-person communication with the PTA members who have completed a Volunteer Interest Form at the beginning of the school year. The time commitment here can be handled numerous ways so don't let the thought of an "all year commitment" scare you off. Emails are often the easiest way to reach out to our parents and the work for this committee can often be done on your schedule.

Ways & Means (Fundraising) - We are losing 1 or both of our team members on this committee this year and we certainly cannot move forward with any of our programs without a successful fundraising event in every school year. We need 1-2 members to help us create awesome and enticing fundraising concepts to take into next year to excite our student & parent population. We have plenty of materials for this team to take with them into next year to start with as well as help from past Ways & Means committee chairs. Please consider helping with a single fundraising event or as the chair for the year.

Thank you for considering working with us in 2011-12! We appreciate your support.

Jackie Weaver

PTA President 2010-11

Upcoming February Excitement!

February holds plenty of its own excitement with our Valentines Day Dance on February 11th. FCAT Formal 5 is held on February 25th and our next Buds Club Movie Night is March 4th. Look for your flyers in your students folder soon!

January 2011

The holidays have past, we returned to school ready for anything & we have already successfully maneuvered through almost 3 weeks of school in 2011. Our PTA activities in December included a special Angel Tree program this year, which helped families in need in addition to the already very successful Giving Tree and Food donation drives held in November/December. The Angel Tree program offers holiday assistance by allowing the families to sign up for assistance from our fellow CCE friends and neighbors through anonymous gift giving for each member of the family. We were able to help over 75 families this year alone through our Angel Tree Program and that is not including the Giving Tree and Food Drive assistance given!

We wrapped hundreds of gifts, passed them out during a CCE event at the Academic Resource Center in mid-December to the delight and very thankful families in attendance. Additional giving was also done through used clothing and food drive offerings at the center that day.

Liz Duncan and her Holiday Helpers did a superb job of pulling this event off in record time, without nearly a hitch! Santa Claus - watch out! We have a local Santa of our own and she's pretty great.

Thank you is such a small word as Liz says, but thank you to everyone who participated in this activity for the 2010 holidays. Your help is immensely appreciated and you provided kindness and support to so many people that didn't know where to turn for help.

January 2011 is off to a great start. The 1st PTA Family Night for 1st, 3rd and 4th grades on January 13th was held with an awesome BBQ Dinner provided by Tim & Kelly Moore. Take out was a new offering for dinner this year and allowed more families to partake in the event even if they weren't able to attend the activities later that evening. 1st grade families got to attend a movie in their child's classrooms "The Magic Bus gets Lost in Space" which thrilled our young audiences. A special thrill was available to anyone who got to view Jupiter through a 1st rate telescope outback on the basketball courts that night as well!

3rd and 4th grade parents got to attend informational sessions about the upcoming FCAT writes and reads on the 13th in addition to a Family Photo event provided by Scott Russell Photography.

1st grade sleepover was held on January 20th with the Constellation Ball attended by everyone that afternoon after a parade and day of science and astronomy-related activities in their various classroom centers.

Wow! It's October already and we've completed 2 fundraisers, a Pancake Breakfast, a Bingo Night and we're working hard on our upcoming Fall Carnival.

The Pancake Breakfast was on 9/17 and was a huge success, just beating out last year's score but with a lot less commotion since we ran 2 times for the breakfast. One at 7:45 helped eliminate the overwhelming crush of people between 8:30 and 9 and made everything work out so well.

We completed the Bingo Night just after Pancake Breakfast and outsold last year's tickets almost by double. The kids and parents had a great time and everyone enjoyed getting their prizes from Mrs. Phillips. One of our parents donated a terrific Coffee/cookies basket as our Grand Prize that night. Thank you!

Our fundraisers including, Enjoy the City books and Mixed Bags, which just ended this week, helped raise over $10,000 for our school programs already!

Fall Carnival preparations are in full swing. This year we will have train rides, hay rides, tons of games & rock climbing walls for everyone's enjoyment. Don't forget - Carnival runs rain or shine!

Teacher Appreciation Luncheon

It's May 5, 2010 and the holiday, Cinco de Mayo, is being celebrated to commemorate The Battle of Puebla when the Mexican militia defeating the French army. As you can see in the photograph, the table is set for the celebration, but instead of honoring the holiday, the PTA is gathering in fellowship to honor teachers.

Teacher Appreciation Week is special to the PTA, because each member likes to give thanks to their children's teachers for their passion, hard work, and dedication to their craft. We know that working at Chets Creek takes heart and we want to say thank you. Thank you for loving our children. Thank you for taking care of their emotional needs. Thank you for taking care of their academic gifts and talents. And, thank you for helping them when they struggle. Thank you for believing in them. And, thank you for making them believe in themselves. We owe you.

We all know that too often the 30 minute duty free lunch teachers enjoy, really is more like 15 minutes after drop off and pick up, and checking email. And, that the bagged lunch has to get old. So, if only for this one day, we say thank you to teachers by providing them with a real hot lunch- soup and salad from the Olive Garden. The teachers look forward to this treat and gather in the conference room with anticipation to find smiling PTA members from our Hospitality Committee. They get a nice hot lunch from yummy Olive Garden and spend time in sheer bliss enjoying the upbeat conversation.

Thank you Linda, Cathy, and crew who made this another unforgettable Teacher Appreciation Luncheon. I know you hit a home run with the CCE crew!

May Meeting

The monthly meeting was held on Monday, May 3, 2010. We were excited to see so many new faces in the crowd and spent the first few minutes introducing ourselves.

Our first topic of business was an update from the Nominating Committee on their recommendations for the 2010-2011 Board. The committee tapped into the general membership volunteers that showed an interest in becoming part of the Board. We were excited to put them in a position based on their interests and our needs. We are confident that the recommendations give us a solid Board for the upcoming school year that will allow the PTA to continue to thrive at Chets Creek. In case anyone is wondering, we are still looking for a PTA President. Any takers?

Old Business

Volunteer Appreciation Update
Last Tuesday, our Volunteer Coordinators hosted our annual Volunteer Reception. All volunteers that dedicated ten or more hours were invited to attend. The PTA Board provided desserts for our fellowship gathering, and door prizes were drawn. About 50 volunteers joined us for the evening and due to the low attendance, we discussed recognizing volunteers in some other manner next year. We proposed having a Board member that would write hand written notes throughout the year to volunteers as they gave of their time and talents. A Board member has been nominated for the position and graciously agreed to thank volunteers as we go next school year.

Arts Extravaganza Update
Arts Extravaganza was a grand success this year. The Arts Baskets put together by the teachers and the Room Parents were put out three days for bidding prior to the Friday Family Night. The baskets raised over $2,000 for PTA which they recommitted to the Arts fund at CCE. The Family Night which included artists, musicians, and art stations were vital in making the night such a success. Our recommendation for next year is to again set up baskets in advance.

New Business

Teacher Appreciation Luncheon
PTA is saying thank you to teachers on Wednesday, May 5, 2010 by hosting a Teacher Appreciation Luncheon. PTA in partnership with Olive Garden is having a soup and salad luncheon from 11 am to 2 pm in the Conference Room.

PTA Night with the Suns (May 11)
On Tuesday, May 11, 2010, all PTA members showing their PTA card when purchasing tickts, will receive 1/2 price tickets at $4.25 in our Special Reserved Section. Children ages 4-14 will get in for only $1.50 each. As an added bonus, anyone who has volunteered 50 hours or more, will get in FREE when they show verification. On slate for May 11th are the Birmingham Barons. Gates open at 6 pm and game time starts at 7:05 pm. Hot dogs, peanuts, and ice cream will cost fifty cents.

DCC Spring Leadership Workshops (Monday, May 17)
We highly recommend all incoming and current CCE Board members to attend Duval County Councils of PTAs annual Spring Leadership Workshop on Monday, May 17, 2010 at the Schultz Center. Registration is on-going, beginning at 9 am and no pre-registration is required. The workshops are free to all PTA members. Classes include:
--So Now You're President Part I
--So Now You're President Part II
--Building a PTA website
--Money Matters-What a Treasurer Really Needs to Know
--Fundraising-How to Make the Best Choice
--Growing Your PTA-Your Membership Campaign
--Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers
--Working with Business Partners
--Getting the Recognition You Deserve-Awards
--Developing Successful Programs
--Secretaries & Newsletters
--Building Your Financial Resources Through Grants
--Keys to Increasing Male Involvement
--Rebuilding Your PTA
--Bylaws & Parliamentary Procedures
--Conflict Resolution

P & P Luncheon (May 27 @ 11 am)
On May 27 interested and available Board members will be attending the P & P luncheon where Awards will be announced. In attendance will be Sue W., Romy, Karen M, Renee, Theresa, Deb O, Maria G, Lourdes, Suzanne, Stanley, Julie, Susan, Kernan Principal, Angela, Linda, Tim M.

PTA DATES TO REMEMBER:
5-5-10 Teacher Appreciation Luncheon
5-7-10 BUDs Club Mother’s Day Cake Decorations
5-10-10 Chick-fil-A Night, Grade 4
5-11-10 PTA Night with the Suns
5-12-10 Early Release
5-22-10 Campus Clean-Up
5-27-10 P & P Luncheon
5-28-10 Schools Closed
5-31-10 Schools Closed
6-07-10 PTA Meeting

Other Tentative Dates of Interest:
June 1 & 3 Third Grade Performances
June 7 K/1 Field Days
June 8 2/3 Field Days
June 9 4/5 Field Days
June 11 Last Day for Students