Weaver Lake Elementary PTO Newsletter

Dear Weaver Lake Elementary School Families,

Weaver Lake Elementary School PTO is planning a fun-filled February! The shortest month of the school year but also the one filled with adventures! Where will the pages bring you?

At our January PTO meeting our group was presented with a funding request from our music department. 2020 presented a challenge to bring music into each individual classroom since the students did not have music classes in the music classrooms. Our top-notch music teachers exceeded this challenge and rolled their pianos into each classroom! Talk about a workout! As you can imagine, moving a piano every 1/2 hour - every day puts extra wear and tear on our equipment. Never fear; our exceptional staff got the piano tuned and ready for the past school year. Unfortunately, the acoustic pianos are not holding their tuning. Our school's pianos are not on the district's replacement list, and they can only offer our school the ability to retune them at this time. The piano that is the highest priority was last turned at the start of the school year, and it needs to be tuned again! This is where the funding request comes in. Our music department has asked the PTO to help fund a professional digital piano! (SO exciting!) The advantages of replacing the acoustic piano with a digital piano are as follows:

1. Being a STEM school, the added digital piano technology is available to all students.
2. The ability to record allows the teacher to move among the students. This makes vocal testing much less stressful.
3. The acoustic piano is much louder and uncomfortable for students and teachers.
4. The profile of the digital piano is smaller and shorter. This allows the teacher to sit and see the students, but more importantly, the students can see the teacher.

The PTO would LOVE to fulfill this request for our music department! This is where you all come in! Our current budget doesn't allow for this item. BUT... we voted and decided that if we can exceed our goal for the read-a-thon ($15,000), the PTO will match the extra money raised over the goal from reserves up to the price of a digital piano for our music department.

We realize this is a big request, but we are confident our school families can help raise this money. Let's show our love to our music department while traveling the world through the pages we read! 

As always, we invite you to join us at one of our meetings, virtually or in person. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to one of our friendly PTO members or send us an email. We hope you have a day, and we hope to see you at one of our events or meetings soon!

Weaver Lake Elementary PTO
www.weaverlakepto.org
officers@weaverlakepto.org
board@weaverlakepto.org

Welcome to Pages take you Places, our 2023 Read-a-Thon fundraiser. For the month of February, students will be fundraising and recording reading minutes to earn fun prizes and help our school. You can register on FundHub for FREE at this link to start fundraising and logging your minutes. If we meet our reading goal, our students will take a trip around the world in books!

Join us for our Dine 2 Donate event on Tuesday, February 7th at Frankie's Pizza in Maple Grove. Weaver Lake Elementary PTO will receive 20% of all sales to help support our school! Please mention Weaver Lake when ordering online or by phone. Pick up orders only. 

If you have any questions, please reach out to Sheila at: kenyon.pto@gmail.com 

• February 1-28 Read-a-thon Fundraiser
• February 6 - No School
• February 7 - 7pm-8pm Dine 2 Donate - Frankie's Pizza - Maple Grove
• February 20 - No School
• February 22 - School Bus Driver Appreciation Day
• February 23 - March - Scholastic Book Fair
• February 23, 28, 3/2 - Winter Conferences

We recently received sad news from Amazon. They are discontinuing their Amazon Smile program on February 20th. Over the years, Amazon Smile has donated a portion of purchases made through their smile.amazon program to help us support our school, teachers, and, most importantly, the children at Weaver Lake Elementary. While other fundraisers have a more significant impact, this fundraiser was passive. Many people already order from Amazon, so why not tap into their charity program? It is important to note that this program only costs you the purchases you are already making. Nothing is added to your purchase to take advantage of this program. 

The Weaver Lake Elementary PTO had hoped we could receive $400 in donations from Amazon Smile this school year. Unfortunately, we currently received $168.58 year to date from this program. While this difference will not make or break the PTO, it does pull us short of our goals this year to fund all the requests we receive from the school. 

Since we have less than a month to max out on their program, please keep in mind that this option is still available until February 20th. So if you plan to make purchases on Amazon, please consider signing up for the program or making sure your account settings are reaping the program's full potential.

You can read the announcement HERE

To learn how to sign up for smile.amazon and make the most of the program before it goes away, please check out more information HERE.

As always, we are thankful for the support you provide our teachers, staff, school, and most importantly - the students of Weaver Lake Elementary!