Picture Time!

Once again it is time for School Pictures! This Thursday, October 1st, make sure you kids are dressed in their best and that they have their filled out picture packet. Depending on the outcomes from school pictures past you may even want to consider sitting down in front of the mirror and practicing those smiles.

Win a Busload!

In the latest newsletter from Labels for Education there was the following excerpt along with lots of additional information on their program.

You could Win a Busload of gear for your school!

One lucky winner will receive $25,000 worth of arts, athletics, and academics gear for their school! You could win trumpets & trombones, baseball bats & soccer balls, paintbrushes & easels, plus a whole lot more! You can enter once a day, so come back every day through 10/31/09! Enter Now.

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

Now that the blog is up and running, the calendar has some events on it and a few people have visited the site it is now time to fill it up. The question is "With what?"

I have my own ideas:

• Get more events on the calendar (PTA events, field trip information, school board and budget meetings, etc)


• Highlight more details on current and potential fundraisers


• Announce student/teacher/community members who receive awards or special recognition.


• Add pictures and details of events as they happen at the school

These are just a few of the ideas that I have but what ideas do you have? Leave comments on this post and let me know. Or if you would rather the idea not be announce publicly in the comments then you can always e-mail me at chadjriddle@gmail.com.

As a final note, if you are reading this then you already know where to find us, but there are a lot of people that do not yet know that we exists. Tell everyone that you know about us. The best way to expand the content, collaboration and effectiveness it to get more people involved.

The Big Clip and Bonus Box Tops

I have to admit that I have known about the Box Tops for Education program for quite a while and I know we have a little box house on our fridge that my wife puts the labels into, but other than that I had never really looked into the program. So the other night I decided to head over to their web site and learn a little bit more. For those, like me, who do not already know the program will basically give the school $0.10 per box top label that is turned in (check out the Box Tops FAQ for more details).

At first it may not seem like much but when I did some simple math:

100 students bring in 5 box tops per month = 500 per month
500 box tops * $0.10 = $50 per month
$50 * 12 months = $600 per year of free money for items most of us already buy.

That started to get me excited about the possibilities. What if 200 or 300 students participated, $1200-$1800 per year. That may not seem like much but I'm pretty sure that would put smiles on a lot of students when they could participate in an extra activity or play with new equipment at recess.

As I read more on the web site I came across several other great features, The Big Clip, Bonus Box Tops and Coupons.

The Big Clip

The Big Clip is a random drawing that is being held to give away 1 Million box tops to schools. To enter is simple, just go to the website and sign up. Each person is allowed to enter once per day up to the ending date on 10/31/09.

Bonus Box Tops
The Bonus Box Tops page offer more ways to get extra box tops through additional drawing or sweepstakes. Once again entering them is easy and many allow entering every day or week.

Coupons
There is also a entire page of coupons to help you save money on the products that support the Box Tops program. A great example is the coupon for fruit snacks. Many of us buy them for our child's lunch and the coupon saves you $1 when you buy two, but on top of that the fruit snacks have two bonus box tops, three total. So when you buy two you save $1 and the school get $0.60. Sound's like a good deal for what we already have in our cupboard.

There is a lot more on the Box Tops web site and you can even track how our school is doing. I encourage everyone to check it out, tell everyone you know, get Grandparents involved and lets make the best of this Great Opportunity.

Translations

Thanks to the magic of Google we now have automagic translations of this blog into many languages. You will see on the right hand side a "Translate To:" gadget. It currently has the default languages. If you know of any other languages that would be useful for readers or if there are languages that are not needed please let me know.

New Place for Information

I am the parent of a student at Wascher Elementary and over the past year I have realized that I am not involved in the school as much as I could or should be. I also noticed that as I did attend PTA meetings or events aimed at parent involvement I would always see the same handful parents. At a school with, most likely, more than 400 parents I found this odd.

As I thought about the reasons why I was not getting involved I kept coming back to one reason, information. The weekly newsletter is good but in a digital age it becomes outdated quickly. I spend the majority of the day behind the computer for my job and if the information I need does not come in my e-mail, through a news feed or automagically appear on my calendar I will most likely not keep tabs on it. Also, when the place I can look online for information is not up to date I find myself not checking it very often.

With that said the faculty at the school does a Great Job at what they need to do, educating our children, but I feel they need a little help in getting the news about what they are doing out to the digital world. That is what I hope that this blog will be able to do. Get the information out to those who need it, when they need it. Parent, grandparents, relative, friends, anyone who has an interst in the students at Wascher should be able to look in one place an get all the real-time information that they need.

If anyone has comments or suggestions on what information you want to see or if you would like to help by sending content for the blog, events for the calendar, or ideas to start a forum for discussion please let me know.