Happy Friday O’Dea Core Knowledge Elementary families! It sure does feel like Spring outside today…a bit blustery…yet beautiful. It makes me want to go buy kites for the children to fly during recess! As we begin to prepare for the month of April…we are fully aware of how precious our time is with our students. We are not counting down the days…yet we are cultivating a gentle sense of urgency for the work in our classrooms. Summer will be here before we know it…and there is much to be done.
I am going to attach our April calendar for you here April 2022 Family.pdf to see what we have on the books for next month. Please note that we will be hosting a School Accountability Committee meeting on Thursday, April 7th at 6:00 in a virtual format. At this meeting we will share out our budget and our staffing plan for next year…and be available for any questions from our parent community. It is always a good information session for families to understand how our budget is developed and where we place our focus each year. I have attached a link for that meeting here Click here to join the meeting for you as well and will resend it again as we draw closer to that date.
We will also be hosting our next O’Dea Family Dinner Night Out at Café Mexicali on Thursday, March 31st. The good news note is that Café Mexicali is donating twenty percent back to O’Dea for breakfast…lunch…AND…dinner! You just need show our flyer (also sent home in a paper form) on your phone…and they will donate back to us! Here is the flyer for your review: Cafe Mexicali.docx
We are also very excited to share that we will be hosting an in-person family event on Thursday, May 12th in the late afternoon/early evening. This will be our first event that we have been able to host since the pandemic…and we are very excited to have our families back on campus. We are still organizing the event…yet our initial thoughts are a Core Knowledge Fair…Book Fair…Silent Auction…Ukulele performance…Food Truck event.
For our Silent Auction we will be having each grade level collection donations for a “Theme Basket” for families to bid on. For example, a grade level may choose a “Beach Theme” basket and that grade level will collect fun donations that connect to the beach to add to a basket for auction. It will be super fun way to bring our school community together and raise funding for our PTA. We will have a flyer out to families as soon as we can…and we hope that you can all join us…we have missed you.
On that note…I wanted to say thank you to everyone for your grace and patience as we navigate our slow reentry to a more typical school day. I will be honest…it has been hard to know when we are going too slow…and when we are going too fast. We want to reopen our doors to our community and go back to being an open campus…and we also want to be thoughtful about where we have been. We have slowly reintroduced after school clubs…and they have filled quickly. We know that there is a desire for more…and we are working on that. We have slowly been allowing folks who are not staff or students…back on campus…yet we are not completely open just yet. What I ask is that we offer grace and compassion to our team members who are doing the best that they can…and if there are questions…please reach out to me…I am here to help.
I hope that you all have lovely weekends with your people. As always…and I cannot say this enough. Thank you for sending us your children every day. They remind us of all the beautiful things in the world…they make us laugh…think…smile…and we all go home at night and sleep deep knowing that we were a part of growing great humans. It is the gift….that keeps on giving.
Please let us know if you need anything.
Much love and support,
Laurie