PTO End of the Year Summary

The PTO set out this year to rebuild a sense of community between families of Brighton and reconnecting parents and kids to their teachers and Brighton administration. We focused heavily on planning and executing family/community events to create a place where our families and teachers can come together and we believe we achieved our goal pretty well! We worked hard to bring back social events, and by way of committed parent volunteers, and the funds raised by the Brighton PTO, we were able to host the following highlighted events!

Did you know that the Brighton PTO plans and organizes in-school enrichment programs that are done during school hours? You may have seen the handmade toys that your children brought home by working with the Toy Maker or heard the children excited about the Lion Dancers at the Lunar New Year celebration. Below are all of the Enrichment activities and assemblies that were organized by parent volunteers and funded by Brighton PTO!

ECE Enrichment events

October- Animal Encounters mobile petting zoo
November- Imagine Children’s Museum “museum on the go” Old Macdonald’s Farm
December- Al Hirsch interactive music presentation
March- Harmonica Pocket- Interactive concert
May/June- Alley Bell music together classes

Elementary Enrichment Events:

September -Toy maker

October- Rhythm Ambassadors (Hispanic music)

January-Lion Dancers, lunar New year

April -Taproot Theater

Middle School Enrichments

September -- Toy Maker

October -- Rhythm Ambassadors drumming workshop

December -- Rock Solid Science

January -- Lion Dancers, Lunar New Year

March -- ADEFUA (African Music and Dance)

May -- Rhythm Ambassadors show

The Brighton PTO historically has subsidized a substantial amount of funds to the overnight trips that the students take, starting in Third Grade. You’ve probably heard about the Mount St. Helens Trip, Camp Seymour, Jim Creek or the big trip by the 8th Graders to Washington DC. These are class wide trips that are paid for out-of-pocket by the parents of each student and the Brighton PTO has worked hard to raise enough funds to help cut some of those direct costs to the families of Brighton. We believe every student should be able to attend these trips if they want and hope to continue to help subsidize these costs going forward so that no student stays back because of financial reasons! Below are a list of all the trips 3rd through 8th graders took this school year.

Homework Club: Kids who needed extra challenge, extra time to complete work or added help with subjects they were behind in, were able to attend homework club after school. This was a drop in program that was paid for by the PTO. We received great feedback from teachers on the program.

Teacher Appreciation: We hosted 5 teacher appreciation lunches this year and organized the teacher appreciation week.

SCRIP: This is a very popular program that allows parents to buy "SCRIP" credit for teachers in any incremental amount. Teachers can then take that SCRIP amount and purchase gift cards of their choosing. Every Staff member received SCRIP credit this year!

Through our School Auction and Fun Run. We also ran small fundraisers such as selling Brighton Gear, Calendars, Directories and ticket sales from the carnival.

The PTO Board would like to extend our heartfelt thank you to all of the volunteers this year: everything from helping out at the carnival, the auction, planning enrichments, the Cultural Fair, Lunar New Year, bringing treats for teacher appreciation lunches, and everything in between, we appreciate you and thank you!

We hope to do the same events that we did this year but will be adding in a Valentines day dance. We will have a Calendar of events for you at the BEGINNING of the year (woo hoo!)

Next year's board will consist of Stacy Nunnelee as President, Francie Zwicker as Treasurer and Jason Steyskal as Secretary. This will be our last year as board members are only allowed to serve two years. So if you have any interest in being on the board for the 2024-2025 school year let us know and we would love to include you this coming year to see how everything works.

We are looking for volunteers for each of the events we are panning. Many of the things we need help with are day of errands (Costco runs etc), decorations and set up help. Please let us know if you would like to help us!

We also are in need of someone to take over SCRIP. The teachers LOVE this program and are soooo appreciative of the person who can keep this amazing program going. Stacey, the previous coordinator is very organized and has set up the process to be seamless. This job can mostly be done from home. This program is documented through excel so this person should be very familiar with excel formulas and data entry. If youd like to learn more about it, please reach out. This is our biggest need for next year.

brightonschoolpto@gmail.com

Cheers to a wonderful year!

Your 2022-2023 Brighton PTO Board

Sonja Dwyer

Jason Steyskal

Francie Zwicker

Stacy Nunnelee