Fall Festival Chair
The Fall Festival is an all school Autumn celebration hosted at the school on a Saturday morning late in October. The Fall Festival includes a pancake breakfast in the cafeteria and games, face painting, and craft activities held in the gym/outside. Responsibilities of the chairs are securing volunteers for set up, pancake making, games, and clean up. Additionally, chairs are responsible for planning/delegating games and crafts and purchasing all needed supplies.

 
More about fall festival 2020
 delivered in a COVID-19 safe way! Join us over MEA break for a socially-distanced scavenger hunt in your community. Search for these items, take a picture of your completed game board, and send it to mbfallfestival@gmail.com by 10/19/20 for a chance to win some very spooky (and fun) prizes!

Book Fair Chair
Each year, the Meadowbrook family celebrates literacy and support of the Meadowbrook PTO by hosting a book fair. A portion of book purchases goes directly to the Meadowbrook PTO and is given to the Media Center leaders to buy books for our Media Center. Also, students and families can recognize their favorite teachers by purchasing books to donate to their classrooms.

Lost and Found Chair
Chair works alongside other volunteers to keep the lost and found area neat and easy for students and parents to find lost items. They look for items that are labeled with students names and return those items to teachers mailboxes so that they can be reunited with their owners. We tag items as they arrive in the lost and found and if they are there for several months without being claimed, we wash them and donate them to PRISM or other charity.

Online Directory and Volunteer Hub Chair
The Online Directory and Volunteer Hub Chair is responsible for managing the front end Wordpress website (www.meadowbrookpto.ptoffice.com) and the back end administration portal. Key responsibilities include registration campaigns, maintaining data integrity, creating volunteer sign-ups, and building and maintaining the website. The majority of work happens at the beginning of the school year when studentclassroom assignments are made in the system and new registrations campaigns happen. Also at the beginning of the year, this chair will generate a master volunteer signup.

Chair has hands-on involvement in execution of the Plant Sale from start to finish - including coordination of logistics (dates, times, volunteer sign ups), communication with the grower, managing customer orders and general troubleshooting. Orders are typical taken in March/April and plants delivery is around Mother’s Day. On the Gardening/ Grounds side, the chair coordinates volunteers and timing of Meadowbrook grounds cleanup.

This chair position requires a commitment of a few hours monthly to maintain the PTO display case of upcoming PTO events and promotions. The display case is located at door L. This chair position works in collaboration with the PTO President(s) and PTO Chairs to obtain event information and additional resources and materials.

Provide a welcome connection point onsite for parents and younger siblings in tow at the start of school year. Typically the first day of Kindergarten, given all students are in school by then, from 9:35-10:30 am. Located on west side of building near drop-off; indoor location (if rain) possibly near the Media Center. Provide coffee (ideally donated), juice and store-bought baked treats, plus Kleenex (boohoo) and balloons (yahoo!). Started in the Fall of 2017, there have been approximately 20 adults with 5-8 preschoolers/babies.

This chair helps Meadowbrook PTO benefit from the Box Tops for Education (BTFE) and Amazon Smile programs, based on parent participation. Every family has the opportunity to select Meadowbrook for automatic donations each time they purchase items using the Amazon Smile website AND they can link Amazon Smile to their smartphone Amazon app. Families can also purchase a BTFE eligible item. BTFE still has certain "clip" items but most are now receipt scannable from the free BoxTops app. Incentives could be a small committee but two co-chairs is feasible. The co-chairs can educate the school population, encourage families to recruit their extended families, design contests for the students, and meet BTFE semi-annual deadlines. Most important is to promote the "easy" funds AND represent the students voice in how the earned monies are used.

Social connection and passive fundraising opportunity, coordinated 4-9 times over the course of the school year (usually not in May). Work with school admin on available dates, avoiding major religious holidays (school admin has some district guidance on this) and weeks with too many MB activities. Most successful participation has been from GV restaurants, Chipotle, Noodles, Culver's, Davanni's plus Roller Garden (SLP). Thursday preference and Monday second choice. Be sure to read fine print (in 2019, Panera required the emails of the MB PTO community; not able to provide). PTO has reusable yard signs for fall/spring (not winter) for Culver's and Davanni’s. Culver's on the final week of school year has been successful.

This chair coordinates parent volunteers that will pass out recess running sticks. Students would run a lap around the track and earn a stick. In the past, the gym teachers would also get involved with getting the sticks collected and counted. Children's names and school pictures would then be put up on poster boards near the front office. There were posters for the "10 mile club" and 25, 50, 100 mile club. As each student would enter each club ... there was a reward (water bottle, T-shirt, etc) and this achievement would be announced with the morning announcements. This is a bit of a reboot at Meadowbrook. We could start with a goal to sign up a parent volunteer for every Tuesday and Thursday (as Monday-Friday might be a tough initial goal). If the Tuesday/Thursday signups are going well ... perhaps we could start a third day ... and so on. Volunteers shifts would be from roughly 11:00-1:30pm (this would span all of the recess breaks from grades K-6). Those 2 1/2 hours could be filled by 1 parent ... or split into 2 shifts (each 1 1/4 hours). This chair would promote this volunteer opportunity (advertise on the Facebook pages, the Principal's Friday newsletter, PTO newsletters, paper flyers to go home, etc). Also as chair, you would maintain the Recess Running Sticks volunteer sign up list. Also as chair, you could also reach out to the gym teachers and classroom teachers and see if they'd help you to market this opportunity to their students ... and then the kids could help by asking their parents to sign up. The heaviest Recess Running Sticks months are Sep/Oct/Nov and Apr/May/Jun. You could take off the months of Dec/Jan/Feb/Mar.

Brian helps his daughter Rose (first grade) come up with ideas for posters and online campaigns for the school and helps her to design them. When not doing her bidding, he serves as a Partner and Creative Lead at a small Minneapolis-based creative agency called Public Works.