We had our Volunteer Appreciation Breakfast this morning. About 80 people came, including several dads (nice to see). It was a very nice event (even if we did have to set it up ourselves!) We have a big screen tv in the media center so we created a looping digital slide show of parents helping at the school throughout the year. We also used the figure JHB turned us on to from the Independent Sector organization: each volunteer hour is worth $17.55. We showed the attendees that it likely they contributed nearly $40,000 worth of volunteer value. That's a great way to quantify volunteerism in a way people can remember. That's the last event for the year. Whew.

Our school does a volunteer breakfast, they asks staff members and myself for lists of volunteers. this year with our new program we were actually able to take our volunteer log in sheets and double check the list. It was amazing to see that probably 95% of our volunteers are beginning to log in. Our staff does all the planning and do all the baking and preparing, they decorate and the do the invitations. This has been tradition at least the last seven years, this year our district also had their first ever volunteer reception, it was nice . I also try to say thank you as much as possible all year to volunteers and at our last meeting we always have a party and i have a little something that i do out of my pocket. little things go along ways

Critter- I thank you from the bottom of my heart for going the extra mile for your volunteers. You are valuable.

Our school staff has a volunteer appreciation luncheon the week after our PTA sponsors a staff appreciation lunch/ day.

I have to thank Patty Catalano of PTO Today for her appropriate prodding at the Chicago conference about the importance of actually inviting people to an appreciation event in person. Before the conference, our Exec Board was just going to send home a flyer about the upcoming Volunteer Appreciation Breakfast and hope people would "self-nominate" to come and be appreciated. With over 20 committees and 550 families, it seemed an impossible task to identify specific people to invite. After all, that's how we did it last year and about 18 people showed up.

But Patty got us thinking, so we sent each teacher a form to return the names of parents who had helped in their classes this year. Often, we know who the "PTO" volunteers are, but not every classroom helper identifies her/himself with the PTO. Anyway, most teachers had at least 8 names. Granted, we have an extremely supportive parent community, but even we were impressed by the numbers. We sent personalize invitations to all those parents (over 170) and to all the PTO committee chairs.

Well, as of today, we have received 76 confirmed rsvp's. We are flabbergasted. There are only 40 chairs in our Media Center! What was going to be a modest continental breakfast is now a hot dish buffet. Since so many people view this as important, we (the board) want to make it extra nice. We're bringing out the tablecloths ($3 each at Kmart during Christmas), brewing the good coffee, and giving individual bedding flowers as party favors. Our Innisbrook rep has given us a bunch of items for doorprizes.

Without a little push, we would have had our typical event, and felt "eh" - we fulfilled our obligation. But now we're making a sincere effort to thank the folks who have taken time to help at our school this year. Just one last question...who's going to thank the Board? [img]smile.gif[/img]