Hello everyone,
I was rather displeased to read the Arizona Daily Sun's front page story and op-ed column on the subject of Arizona's public school tax credit program in the paper this week.
By way of clarification, and in order to once-again have a chance to tout all that we're uniquely able to do at Marshall because of Arizona's tax credit program, I wrote a short rebuttal for the Sun, which I was happy to see was included in the newspaper the next day.
I stand by my assertion that "It is due to the efforts of Marshall’s staff and PTO to solicit tax credit contributions, write grants, and cooperate with local organizations to coordinate fundraising events, that Marshall is able to provide of one-of-a-kind fieldtrip and learning-experiences in the arts and the sciences to our students."
It takes a great concerted effort from everyone at Marshall to make sure our programs and activities are funded year after year. You are a big part of that. It's never too soon in the school year to begin reminding your parents that their tax credit contributions sustain our Suzuki violin and Magnet Monday programs. Without these contributions, our programs would cease to exist.
RAK
My special thanks to all of you, and especially to the members of last year's formed-on-the-fly Marshall RAK Committee, for your efforts to fulfill Epiphany Church's expectations for last year's Random Acts of Kindness fundraiser. Lots of you bought and sold raffle tickets and helped the committee get done the many other things that needed to be done.
I'm happy to report that, thanks to your earnest efforts (and to the
anonymous raffle prize winner who donated all of the $1000.00 prize money back to Marshall School) we received checks totaling $6880.00 from the church this week! That gift, like all the money we raise via the Gallop, Dodgeball, sundry donations, and, most-importantly, tax credit contributions will ensure that you and your students will always have the things that you need as well as ensuring that the myriad, unique, one-of-a-kind fieldtrip and learning experiences we offer to our students are able to continue throughout the new school year.
Well done, Marshall.
Department and Parent Involvement Chairs
It was cool to see that so many of you were interested in representing and serving your fellow staff members as department chair. Both primary and intermediate teachers were asked to vote for representatives this year. The results are as follows:
- Primary department chair: Kristin Hulls
- Intermediate department chair: Emily Petrie
Likewise, I am very happy to see a broad cross-section of our staff on the Parent Involvement Committee. As you know, we have set aside $1000 in a stipend for faculty leadership for this important group and the events they help coordinate on our behalf. A trio of teachers will divide the stipend three-ways this year and provide essential guidance for this committee. They are as follows:
- Amy Ronn
- Cheryl Paulsen
- Sarah Poland
Home-School Communication
In our discussions as a faculty about our APTT-inspired Connect-To-School events we concluded that attendance was our chief concern for these open houses. Similarly, we reached the conclusion in responding to post-event surveys and when talking together as a staff that it would be best to have regular reminders and event-invitations sent from each classroom teacher to each family, to compliment the school-wide flyers and reminder robo-calls.
Now is the time to begin this effort. Please be sure to include updates and reminders about our 10 September Connect-To-School night in any upcoming home-school communiques that you send. I am confident we will see a marked improvement in our attendance rate if we ensure that each of or parents has been repeatedly reminded of the importance of this event well in advance of the night.
While you're at it, if you could please remind your families to return their pink free-and-reduced lunch forms (or to complete the
online application), that would be awesome, too. There's a lot of funding riding on our ability to gather these forms back. Don't forget: we fund a number of key faculty roles via our Title 1 budget. So, please don't let up on your instance that these forms make it back to school complete.
And tax credit! Never a problem to remind them about tax credit, too.
Thanks!
Calendar
Week B
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