The 2023-2024 school season hasn’t even started and parents old and new to KMS have already met to talk about our plans for the year.
My name is Paul Beakley and I’m the president of your PTO this year. My daughter will be entering 6th grade at KMS in a couple weeks. A couple weeks! Such a short summer. Brooke St. George, the KMS PTO president for the past three years, reached out to me while I was on the board at Waggoner Elementary next door. We talked extensively, I’ve met with KMS faculty, other PTO presidents from across the school district, and many of our most involved parents at KMS. I said yes and was voted in in April. Let’s do this thing.
Objectives for 2023-2024
I’ve got three objectives I discussed at our planning session. I hope you’ll help us reach these goals.
- Fundraising growth. KMS is a big school with a big faculty and many needs. We’re operating within a well structured budget and it’s highlighting that the best thing we can do for the school is to grow the PTO budget.
- Greater representation. I would love to see more of every kind of parent involved in the PTO. That includes more Spanish-language representation as well as every other kind. More volunteers from a broader cross-section of the school.
- Stability, reliability, consistency. Three years is not a long time, and I’m realizing that coming from six years at Waggoner. It’s hard to keep projects moving forward when you’re constantly needing to recruit and train up new parents. Just when you get good at your job it’s time to move on to high school for many of us. Stabilizing the ongoing PTO is important to me.
Acting Officers and Board
Per that last bullet, KMS PTO started the year with just a president and a treasurer: Liz Fischer, who is doing an outstanding job already wrangling our newly restructured budget. But we still need a vice president and a secretary.
Incoming Waggoner mom Merideth Gradowski volunteered to be acting secretary at our summer planning session, so we’ll be able to provide accurate minutes here at KMSPTO.net in the future.
We still need an acting vice president. If you like organizing volunteers, have the time to participate in ongoing officer meetings and might want to look at being the KMS PTO president in the future, come to our next couple in-person PTO meetings! First one is August 11 at 9am. Subscribe to our new calendar to keep up with our events.
Committees
We’re working out the right set of committees to handle our current volunteering and fundraising commitments, but this is where we are now. All these committees need volunteers! So please consider attending the next few PTO meetings to see where you might be able to lend your skills and time.
- Communications: this is the combined work of our social media (Facebook and Instagram), website (the thing you’re on now) and our newsletter (which I hope you’ve signed up for).
- Event Liaison: someone to work with athletics, performing arts and club events so we know what’s going on in the school and how we can help.
- Staff Appreciation: the folks who show the faculty love and support all year long, organize Meet the Teacher Week at the end of the year, and so on.
- Fundraising: vitally important to figure out how to grow our budget year after year. Notionally our Restaurant Nights fits inside this, and Amy Yosowitz has continued to do a bangup job with it.
- International Fest Raffle: the PTO will set up another table at next year’s Fest and hopefully offer even more baskets!
- Community Events: work on supporting community events we’re already doing, as well as find new events to participate in.
- 8th Grade Promotion Dance: the end of year dance for our outgoing 8th graders.
- Dodgeball: Our next big new fundraiser and fun event for the kiddos. Exciting, challenging, really need some leadership to make this happen.
Upcoming Calendar of Events
Look on the homepage and please consider subscribing to our Google Calendar. As we add new events they’ll be added automatically to your phone calendar.
Our first PTO meeting will be August 11 at 9am, with a Zoom option if you can’t be there in person. We’re working on having guest speakers as well.
And that’s it! I am really looking forward to meeting everyone. See you in August!
