Hello JWB Families,
Happy Holiday Season! We hope you are gearing up for a blessed holiday with your families, and a restful winter break! We have some PTO events coming up:
Five Below Fundraiser - December 18 - 24th. Bring the attached flier to 5 Below (a great place for stocking stuffers!), and a portion of all sales during that week will be donated to the PTO.
PTO Table at Winter Concerts - We will be manning a table during the winter concerts (see dates below) to increase membership and our newsletter audience. If you are able to help out for ANY amount of time during ANY of the concerts, please let us know! You can respond to this email.
Next Wood'n Wheel Fundraiser - We made $715 at our November fundraiser! Our next JWB night is Friday, January 27 -- we hope to see you there!
Santa Fe Fundraiser - Thursday, January 26. Taco Thursday!!! Enjoy an excuse to NOT cook dinner, and support the PTO! Santa Fe will donate 20% of all eligible sales to the PTO -- no flier is necessary, you just have to say you're there for JWB; so spread the word.
and the coup de grace...
Spring Mud Run co-sponsored with Miller PTO - this is going to be a FANTASTIC event! We discovered a company called Your First Mud Run. They are based in New Jersey, and sponsor family-friendly mud runs in the tri-state area. All of their obstacles are movable, and several are inflatable, so they can easily bring a mud run to any location; and the course is designed so that kids as young as 5 can do it -- the whole point is that an entire family can run the race together.
You can check out their website and some videos here:
https://yourfirstmudrun.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBKKvDqmuSg
We also have a Powerpoint from the company, which we will try to share.
They do mud runs as fundraisers, which caught our attention...although the down side is that they have to make sure they will make enough for their company to be worth it for them, which is between $10,000 and $13,000. That's a bit of a heart stopper, but the upside is that they do EVERYTHING: they set it up, take it down, staff it, carry insurance, etc. They take their cut of the proceeds, and then anything left over is ours. As the staff member we spoke to also pointed out, we can do any number of other events at the same time, as it will be best as an all-day event (e.g., sell food, have games, a picnic, face-painting, WHATEVER!) We plan to announce the event at the District-Wide-Parents'-Group, and invite all the schools to staff a table for whatever fundraiser they'd like to do on that day. Hopefully that will increase participation in the run -- if all the schools have skin in the game, they'll be more likely to spread the word!
To make the event profitable, we'd need between 400 and 500 participants in the run, which the staff member assured me is completely doable for them (they send runners out in smaller groups, and again, it's an all-day event).
We will hold the race at Miller Middle School - the cross country course is already there, which makes Miller the ideal location.
And as one of our board members pointed out, maybe we shouldn't think about it as a fundraiser (although if we make a couple thousand dollars, that'd be awesome!) but rather as a fun event -- the kids will have a blast just running the race, and it will also be so much fun to see their teachers, principals, friends, parents, etc. getting all muddy.
We are planning to have the event in June, which gives us plenty of time to promote it, as well as get some business sponsors (if you know of a local business who would be interested in sponsoring, let us know!) The more help we can get from businesses, the less we will have to charge per runner.
More details will be forthcoming!
Have a lovely holiday,
Stephanie
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