Summary and action items from the August 14, 2025 PTA Executive Board meeting — held ahead of the 2025–2026 school year. Topics: budget (two K-1 TAs at $40k), back-to-school breakfast, event leadership gaps, website, and grant strategy.
PTA Exec Meeting Aug 14 2025
Summary
Welcome Letter and Back-to-School Breakfast
• PTA is working on a welcome letter for the new school year
• Planning a back-to-school breakfast with more energy than previous years
• Malia will create a fun flyer to send with the welcome letter
• East Village residents (Brooke, Malia, Chiara) will arrive early to set up tables
• The goal is to capture enthusiasm of new families at the start of the year
Budget and Treasurer Updates
• Budget adjustment needed: Two TAs ($40,000) instead of one ($20,000)
• The Ashokan grant will be $8,000 instead of $10,000 due to missed bus insurance paperwork
• Plans to hold budget meetings earlier this year (October and April)
• Need to create clear reimbursement process documentation for teachers and committee members
• Stephanie will meet with Lee in the next two weeks to finalize budget details
Action Items
• Brooke to text Malia about creating the welcome flyer
• Stephanie to make all folders within the 2526 parent folder accessible via link
• Stephanie and Lee to draft reimbursement instructions for teachers
• Stephanie to update budget line item for TAs to $40,000
• Exec board to review the events committee document and provide feedback
• Sarah to touch base with Amy about potentially continuing Art Day
• James to forward website document to Brooke and organize a follow-up meeting
• James to pursue DOE sustainability grant ($5,000) for the garden in September
Event Planning
• Considering replacing Holiday Fair with "Friendsgiving" potluck (more streamlined)
• Movie nights need new leadership - identified potential volunteers with film backgrounds (Mark, Dave, Tim, Myra)
• Talent show will be led by Sarah Halpern for the third year
• Need new leads for Liberty/Cyclones games and Art Day
• Events should be led by committed parent volunteers, not defaulting to exec board members
• Discussion about balancing fundraising value against volunteer effort required
Website and Communication
• Current website platform is outdated but paid for through this year
• Content needs updating, particularly for recruitment
• Concerns about long-term sustainability and parent management of the website
• James has created automation for handling website update requests
• Need to schedule a separate meeting with Dianthi and Denise about website management
• Considering future alternatives including a more sustainable technical solution
Diversity and Inclusion
• Brief discussion about PTA being perceived as "so white"
• Consideration of meeting timing to accommodate more diverse participation
• Question raised about evening meetings or Zoom options to increase accessibility
Grants
• Pursuing DOE sustainability grant ($5,000 for garden/outdoor learning)
• Need to reapply for the Ashokan grant this year
• James plans to organize grants by difficulty level and work through them systematically
Notes
Transcript
Feeling back to a some semblance of pre-COVID vibes, right? There were more people there. There was more energy. Of course, Alex was there, but you know what I'm getting at. Yeah, and I think let's get Malia to do a nice fun flyer that we can send out with our letter.
Hopefully put a few of those up at the school for the first day of school.
And just kind of talk it up to everyone, like you said, in our classes, in our class chats, once those all get up and running, really pushing that. Because there was a lot of excitement at the beginning of the year. New families come and they signed up.
But a lot of people did sign up for stuff, so I think we really want to capture that. When people are like fresh, you can commit to stuff from the first day or first two weeks. When Sarah sends us the notes from today, will you share them back with Molly and ask her to make...
The fire yeah, I think I'm just going to also just text her today because sometimes she doesn't answer when she's yeah, you know got all the.
I'll try to be better about that, but everybody also feel free to. You know, collective effort on everything. So we can we can come back either in an email or in the chat. with, you know, digging up the tasks for the breakfast. Simple, you know, communication on Constellan. We'll have the flyers, but just, you know, maybe the week before deciding who's bringing what and maybe the East Village folks agreeing to get there a little bit early to bring the tables out.
Sorry, I'll pause here. I'm following along. Interrupt me, please. Who are the East Village folks besides me and Brooke? Anyone else? Malia? Right. Malia? Chiara? Okay. Kara? Right. Okay. I think that's it, right? Yeah. And where does Annie live? She's a, yeah, she lives in, near Sarah, down Grand Street area. Who?
Uh, Lee. She lives in one of the co-ops down there. I don't know which one. I think... No, but yeah she lives on the Lower East Side. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Brooke and Alex sent out a welcome letter at the end of the summer last year. We started working off of that template for another kind of just like PTA welcome to go along with what is usually Dianthi's welcome.
I linked the draft to it in the agenda. We haven't finalized it yet. Anybody who has any feedback on that or wants something to be included, it's still loose. My one note is to tighten it up. I feel like If we send things that are longer than a page, it's probably too long. But, you know, the main goal there being to set the tone of
A couple times a year, you're going to hear from us in more like larger, formal communication, drumming up energy and also reiterating the ask. of support with money, time, presence.
So when it's final, we'll share it again for any other feedback, but if you want to give some in the meantime, please do.
I'll pause again if anybody has questions or comments. Just that I clicked on the link earlier and it said I needed access. I will go back and make all of the folders within the 2526 parent folder. Accessible to anybody with a link. I don't know why I seem to have trouble with that, but I'll take care of that.
Steph, this is, and we don't need to get too in the weeds about it, but there are a couple of of loose ends on the budget, one of which, of course, is that we will have two TAs again. Which means that the line item that we thought was going to be $20,000 is going to be $40,000. And while we're like super excited to not be closing a K-1 classroom, it obviously like
changes the budget considerably. Dianthi made a comment to Brooke and I in an exchange about other loose ends, something to the effect that she Thought that there may have been some leftover money from that budgeted item from last year. And that her budget person was on vacation. Long story short, we're waiting for her to tell us if we do have some money from that bucket from last year's budget to roll.
into this year's. Okay. I wonder how that would be. Yeah. Same. Same. Same. I'm not having my friends on that one to be honest. I'm trying to think I'm trying to recall now, like how payment went out to the TAs, we paid the DOE, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, and we did two payments, I'm pretty sure. So yeah, I'm not sure the extra money would have come from that she's referring to, but okay. Let's see what she says. In the meantime, you can just go ahead and amend that line item to look like last year. Okay.
The other thing was, and this was in response to Mario's last come to us with his his final stuff, I at that stage hadn't seen the staff gifts that Brooke purchased at the end of the year, but maybe now that's been added, I admittedly haven't gotten back into the purchase since then.
Okay, if Mario hasn't added it, then I have not. So, and Lee and I, Lee is having some family stuff going on right now, but we're gonna try to meet in the next two weeks in the evening to get.
There, so. Okay.
All of the filters are accessible in the proper way. Do you prefer to have a totally separate
Treasurer's folder outside.
No, I don't think so. That sounds good. Unfortunately, the $2,000 that we were going to have in addition to
For the Ashokan grant we're not getting because we did that insurance paperwork from the bus and we never got that to them. Dianthi eventually did get it to them but they told us that they didn't want to do it. I told her it was too late and she's, we can't do we can't. So we couldn't submit for that funding, like for the addition of the rest. So the grant total was 8000 instead of 10,000.
We had to have had it in place before the trip because the bus had to be insured in a certain way. And since it wasn't insured in that way, we weren't able to expense the transportation funding as a part of the grant. That's so annoying. Thousand.
Stephanie, do you feel like that was just a snafu or do you feel like there is
That it was a communication breakdown on who was supposed to be doing what? I think it might have been just a snafu, but I think that... Okay. But it also has to do with just not having proper information. So, like, I didn't realize that we had to have special, like, I knew we needed the insurance documents. I did request it for Dianthi.
Take a very, very long time to get it from Diane. That is true. It reminded her five times for it. Eventually it came, but, and it came too late, and it came incorrectly. So, you know, where that breakdown is, I'm not sure. I think where it was a mistake on my part is in submitting the grant in the application. I did submit for transportation costs.
Included in the fund in the grant because I wanted to pay for this, but I did that in order to submit for transportation costs we had to have this very specific insurance that.
So it's kind of like just never done. Yeah, totally. Another sort of reason. And why it really makes sense for these two-year positions, so that, I don't know, I mean. That they're two-year positions, but that's also like knowledge that gets passed from administration to administration. And we will apply again this year. So I did have a call with the program officer and she did encourage us to apply again this year and thinks that we'd.
So I think we could put that back in the budget for this for years. That reminds me of the Studio in a School grant. Have you had any comments about that? Okay, that's actually something to start nudging Dianthi about.
Oh, I think...
I think I took I took over the studio in the school. No, I think go ahead. I think what you're thinking about James is the original works. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. Yeah, I got a mix up. Yeah, that's different, but let's talk about that basically next. I'll make a note.
Any other treasurer budget stuff that you want to talk about right now, staff?
No, that was the main. Well, actually I do want to, you know, we did that budget meeting in the spring last time like, yeah.
I think it's worth doing that earlier in the year this time. So maybe it's an October meeting agenda or depending on what our agendas look like for the general. I mean, even if it's not, I mean, we obviously we filled the time with a dedicated so I think it's good to have that early on. And that way, we also can kind of
Just start getting people accustomed to the idea that we need to fundraise for things. And so then we get to the end of the year and we just have people understanding the need for fundraising early on. Such a good point. I say Not only a good point, but necessary because we still haven't, like, we voted on the provisional budget, right?
We don't have the final budget. So I think setting it as a regular cadence that the October general meeting and the April general meeting have. At least some significant portion dedicated just to that. I think you're totally right. It's so much is about repetition.
Telling people over and over again, like, you like this thing. This is what it costs. Yeah. I think, and also I love early on, this is just a mistake that we never did last year, that I never did last year, was just letting people know at the start of the year what the reimbursement process is.
So that... I was like thinking about how we do it, because not everything is reimbursable according to our budget. Making a general announcement about this might cause some confusion from people who are then submitting reimbursement requests for things that like are not included in our budget or you know that we technically can't reimburse for.
So I want to figure out a way, like, who is it that we target? How do we relay the information? You know, and it could be that we're just, like, we just Trust people and let people reference the budget to say like if you have a reimbursable expense, please align it with one of these categories so that we know that it's eligible or if we're just
I mean, I think the teacher reimbursement has to be shared. I was going to say, I was going to say, let's start with that. If if you and Lee could actually. draft a note to them, referencing the budget, it's the cluster teachers and the teachers. Let's have that go out.
To just the teachers, along with our welcome letter to the GenPOP, telling teachers, this is what is allotted to you. This is the process. I think we had said something like within 90 days. Totally. And then we could use that template. For starters, maybe once we get people signed up for committees, like the people who are in committees that are doing event type stuff, right? Like if we do get I'm
We have the whatever they are and we could do we could start with a communication to those people if you're involved in any of the following activities and have an expenditure for the activity. If you are under $250, please remember that this is the process for reimbursement. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I think that sounds good. I have a question.
Try to submit for things that we don't cover. Okay. No. All right. I've flagged. Everything needs to be covered. But it can get chaotic around reimbursement time. Like, you know, end of year expenses. Tatiana is often cut. Like, you know, I remember the Liberties game was a big...
Like how we buy tickets for things, you know, I ended up just using my personal credit card and reimbursing myself for these tickets and that is the type of thing that comes up a lot when new events come up and we have to like.
It was supposed to buy those tickets on her credit card. Amy didn't buy those tickets on her credit card? No, it becomes... File updated. Tatiana wrote to me in an urgent... Run in command. You know, we can't, we need these tickets now. We can't, you know, or we're going to lose them.
And so I was like, OK, I'll just pay for them and reimburse myself. Since I'm the one doing reimbursements, it's easy for me to do. Thank you for doing that. Stephanie, I had no idea. Yeah, I had no idea either. Ellen, you left some bottles of wine in the PTA room.
You know that, right?
No, they're not mine. Okay, great. So I took them as a reimbursement. And we were popping bottles the last day of school on the playground. If somebody says that the wine is missing, I just didn't want to go through the paperwork. And I bought two tickets to some event I forgot, but I got
a ticket worth of wine. So I wouldn't worry. I wouldn't worry about that. Just let everybody else know that that's an option, you know, unless I get in trouble. Let's go get a bottle of wine. In theory, people who spend money within the guidelines to make something happen for a
should get reimbursed for it. If, anyway, you guys know the drill. I think the point here, yes, Stephanie, is early communication and repeated communication. So, Let's use what you draw for the teachers as a starter. Amy has now told us that she's not going to be spearheading anything next year.
We will do hopefully a fundraiser with another parent spearheading it and it will go in a different process than this. Did everyone feel good about that fundraiser? Yeah, it was well attended and fun. Yeah, yeah, okay. And there's no reason why we shouldn't repeat it now that we've.
Started a calendar early. The thing is, we will continue. I think it's just like endemic to a volunteer organization, right? However big or small the project is, it still needs a project manager. And they can't all be one of us. So it's totally misspoke. It was Tatia and the Cyclones. It was not the Liberty game that I got the tickets. It was the Cyclones game. Okay.
Okay, well either way it shouldn't come out of left aside from the fact that I thought that was a Kristin Schody thing. Running command. No, in theory the process isn't you getting frantically emailed at the 11th hour and laying out a couple grand on your personal credit card if you hadn't previously agreed to
Yeah. It's not fair. Is there a list? I think there's a list, right, of the events planned for this? Yes, it's also linked in the agenda, which you probably can't access. You know what? Let me know. I think I could access it. They're also on the TNS Google Calendar, too, all the events. Running command.
Some of them, not all of them. Most of them. Most of them.
But there are a couple of important things that, if you look at them in the aggregate, generated a fair amount of money. that we don't currently have owners of. Those include Movie Nights in general, the Liberty and Cyclones games, and Art Day, which Amy has communicated to us she will not spearhead.
Our day actually did bring in money because I was going to say I feel like that was it did. It did. Yeah.
At some point, if you, if you, and then Steph, tell me if this isn't an accurate summary. You'll see for the last couple of rounds, there's one event that makes just as much, if not more, as all of the other ones combined, which is the auction and sprinkling. So obviously the most important thing. And then there's all of these little things, but that
All together, add up to a really important sum of money. So if any one of those or two or three of those gets removed, it starts impacting. So if you look. You know, something like the Holiday Fair or Art Day. I don't know. There's somewhere between two and three grand. It's not tons of money, but...
You get the drift. Yeah. This is true. It also we do want to analyze the amount of labor that goes in to God. Yes. It kind of depends. I mean, I am not, and I have been pretty clear that I just don't want to be an events person. I just know that. So I'm not the one organizing them.
But it seems to me like it takes a lot of effort and energy to organize even the smallest event, like a, you know, even like a bake sale or a movie night or something like all of that. It's a lot of work and coordination. So, you know, it depends if people feel that it's worth it for their time, then, you know, it is a good amount of money for us or it's helpful to us. But if there's a way to substitute,
Another auction type event in the fall that could raise just as much that maybe is just like a one time it's a lot of effort obviously you all you you all organized this auction in spring fling you know what that took. But I know we had talked about a dinner idea, potluck kind of idea, some kind of fall festival, community event, something that is just like...
A little more of like an all-hands-on-deck in the fall that could raise the money. But people like the events that they're doing, it seems like, too. So, you know, I wouldn't discourage people from doing it. But if we're hearing from people like, oh, this is way too much work, then we may want to evaluate. Like, if you're all feeling burned out on this and it's only getting $2,000, it's only raising $2,000, maybe we try something different, you know?
I think the main thing, along with the other things that we're saying need to be reiterated at different points of the year, is... All ideas are valid and all ideas are welcome, but anyone who brings something to the floor has to have a proposal for who's going to run it.
So, there's not this default, oh, one or two people on the PTA are going to run all the events. That said, I do think that it's kind of hard as exec board members to turn around now and say like, well, you know, In order for each and every event that we've always done to to be run, we need a new person to step forward and hold it like we can say, all right, we're going to spearhead the fall event. We're going to spearhead the spring fling. But these other things are individual committees.
or project managers and they need people to step forward on them. As far as the fall event, the thing formerly known as the holiday fair, unless there is a parent who comes forward and says I want to run the holiday fair the way that we've always done it, and I'll be in charge of it. The working idea right now is what you said, Steph.
giving potluck. We've ask in for a permit for both and to be able to serve a which we can have for free, and, you know, we'll divvy up food assignments by grade band, so really streamline it, have a, you know, A nice menu, and we can still have the box maze, still have the car derby, we have all of those things set up, somebody wants to run a photo booth, they can, but a lot more streamlined and not, you know, 19 tables with 19 different.
craft elements that just is a shit show. Basically the messaging is all the events that we're going to have on the calendar are things that we can do and we know we can comfortably execute. And we're open to other ideas, but people really have to manage them, like, and have to come forward. Like, we can't add... With our bandwagon, we're tapped out, and we know what we can handle on our own.
We're doing it already. So with like the sports games, all these things are totally doable. We just need to find someone who wants to run them. Yeah. I think the Friendsgiving, I think that sounds great. I do wonder. I could talk to Amy when we're back and just check in with her because I've been involved in Art Day in the past and maybe I could convince her if I do it with her or something instead of just a panel. I feel like she might be.
I think she's being pushed a lot. Um, but I do wonder, I like the timing of our day because it could be like a pre-Valentine's day, like kids could just make all their Valentine's cards and instead of buying them. And if we don't have those million booths at the holiday fair, maybe it won't feel that repetitive to do some of the craft stuff at art day.
Totally. I was kind of like, yeah, I felt like our day and holiday fair last fall was like too much and too much of the same like thing in a certain way. And so, and we also had the wine night in between the two things. So it was kind of like one, two, three and
Anyway, you know, regardless of whether it's pushing Amy towards it or not, I do think that we are in like these generational shifts and certain arenas, and we need kind of some other people to step forward. I had asked Amy if she had somebody to suggest who was sort of...
in our day last year. Sarah Halpern already agreed to Spearhead talent show again. I think it's great. That means it's going to be our third year running and you know, there's there's a groove there. So We can also be more supportive in talent show to kind of, you know, drum up involvement and therefore fundraising.
Okay. Yeah. All right. I'll touch base with Amy just when school starts. I don't want to read it now, but maybe one thing that everyone can do afterwards also is look at that events committee doc and kind of go over the committees and see. I don't know, thinking about your institutional knowledge also, like what did it used to look like? What did it look like last year? What did, what worked, what didn't? Because I, Brooke and I did feel like
Last year, having the clipboards at the breakfast and kind of getting people to sign up for things. Like, it is important. Whether or not 100% of the people who sign up for things are then 100% accountable, we know that that doesn't happen, but at least we have, like, a pool to start fishing from.
Right at the start of the year.
I do feel like movie night, like we have, don't we have the rooftop films person now? Like I feel like we should, I feel like we should tap that. I mean. Sarah and Tim are also film people. Dave in the other room is a film person and I've definitely tried to get him more involved and I think he would do it if there's like a crew and not just him. Oh, and Stephanie, Mark is a film person. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, okay. Yes, get Dave and Mark and all those guys to help Strat. Cause I think Kristen's leaving and Strat's doing it alone. I think he needs a little bit of a nudge and a push. I think it's communal. That'll be much more fun. I think it should be a little more avant-garde, personally. I don't know. Like, let's lean into our coming... I don't know. Why not?
Honestly, those actually make money. Movie nights are one of the higher money makers of all the events, considering they're not a ton of work. They're really not. Yeah. I would love to get, Mark's like, are you talking about me? He's like, are you volunteering me to do something here? Yes.
Yeah. You know, Myra, Zora's mom, who's a good friend of mine, she's like a big film buff and she's not involved in much with the PTA or the school really. And I'm always like, trying to sort of figure out ways that she would be interested in being involved. And she loves film. And I wonder if she would be an interesting person to talk to who's not involved in anything else related to the PTA. That's such a good idea, Stephanie, because really it is like, even if we just.
Put four dates on the calendar and the people who are involved in it are committed to it and do it. We could make sixth grade. Yeah, I'm really grateful. You know, we'll make more Stephanie. Maybe we could just help like like a range of meeting for the
The film people do sit with each other and like sit out. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. My two cents on like the avant-garde portion of it, Sarah, is that people do like bring their kids to it because they're... like fun kid movies or whatever. So I don't know, like, I don't know what happens if we start trying to show like, you know, Marcel or.
But whatever, maybe it's a mix of all of it and whatever the movie people decide to do is great. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like ever so slightly, like more... Yeah. Just like not Disney. Yeah. Well, it's just like the lowest... Anyway, yeah. Yes. Yes. Totally. Which one? No!
It's beautiful animation and really high quality, but like very kid. I mean, it's, you know, but just like a high quality film. We could talk to the film. See what we can come up with. Modifying files. Um. To do to do Brooke. Outside of our. Exact meeting dates. Was there anything else that we wanted to touch on sort of picture wise? No, no. The main thing is, yeah, getting new people who.
Either new to the school or haven't been involved, like excited and energized and reiterating that it's actually fun, not all just tedium. Hey, I do want to mention one other thing that Like, I don't mean for it to drag us into a rabbit hole, but for it just to chew on. I had a coffee with Diane before we left for Italy.
And she, you know, she gave me a little bit of her moratorium on the playground fracas. But then we more broadly were just talking about like the school and just, you know, how hard it is to try to. Walk the walk of anti-racism and anti-bias and to be coherent and consistent and...
It's in conjunction to what I don't know, but he made a remark that another staff member had remarked that the PTA is so white. Um, take that for for what it is. It just made me think a little bit about. The question of timing of the general meetings, and I know it's something that we've kind of, um,
Toyed with the, do we do an evening meeting? Do we make one meeting strictly Zoom in the evenings? And basically, I just wanted to voice that and let you all reflect on it. I take it as a compliment.
That's what I've been going for this whole time, to be more white and look a little bit more polished. And I'm glad somebody saw the results of my hard work. Oh, I gotcha. I missed you so much. Are you wearing goggles? Yeah, we, uh... Selina woke up from her nap and she's been putting stuff on me. Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there for people to chew on.
We can.
Think about it. Lee mentioned that some of the original exec meeting dates that I had thrown out were on half days. And so we amended them. The list is below. Barring anybody having another like... major issue with any one of those dates. I'll go ahead and create the invites for all of them and copy Brooke's Zoom link from today.
That's what I got and back to you all for anything else.
Can we talk about the, I guess we don't have to talk about it right now, but like the plan for this website and how we going? address the influx coming soon of requests to update it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where, where Has anything transpired as of our last meeting, James, when we were sitting in the room with Dianthi and Denise and we made really clear that like you were not the webmaster? Yeah, so I made a document. I sent it out. Everybody was too busy to really tap into it.
We really couldn't even get a good meeting in. Modifying files. File updated. before everybody else starts piling on their requests. Is Brooke in that communication that you sent with the document? I think I cc'd you and Brooke, but if not, I'll send it back out again, just to bump it up to the top of the inbox for everyone.
Yeah, I mean, I have a backup plan, but what I really want to talk about is, are we getting the value out of this platform that we thought we were going to get? And if not, what is our plan for the end of the contract to pivot to something that we know what we're getting and we're getting what we want?
I got a plan. I got a plan for right now and in the future. Good. It's just I don't know if people are going to like the plan, but the truth is I'm the one that's supposed to cook the dinner. I'm going to season it how I want to season it. I found out a way to automate the complete education network process from email requests all the way to making a new post on the site.
And I just ask AI to take my login and go do it for me and take a screenshot when you get done of the finished page. We have a lot of people at the school who are. anti-AI You know just for whatever reason bad for the environment bad for jobs, whatever whatever But they're asking me to do it Felicia hates AI because you know Whatever her reasons are with the environment and electricity and stuff. She's a tree hugger
We'll directly quote you in our next conversation. Please do. I mean, I understand the hazards, but we got tools that we get for free that we're not leveraging that the teachers need to be using, and we're holding them back by not. I do think that we should schedule, let's schedule a separate meeting for this with a plan to talk to Dianthe and Denise and whomever.
My my one comment on everything that you've just said up until now is does does it make sense for a parent to be The sort of like folder of the website of the school, like then when you're out of commission or no longer here at the school or whatever it is. Well, Elena, that's what they said was the problem with my idea. I said, why can't parents take care of our own website solution?
And Alex said, well, what if you're not here anymore? How are we going to find someone else to take over? What if we don't have any tech-savvy parents? And it looks like we're in the same boat right now. What happens when James leaves? Who knows how to navigate this? The tech support already said, no, I'm not doing it. You do it. So you're going to have to talk to them anyway. And we're right back to square one. So we could. And then we're going to work.
Yeah, or we're going to have to pay for their expensive solution, which is also suboptimal. Their white gloves are premium. And we're on the hook for a huge amount of money for this website. More than what we should be paying for that kind of website.
It's so outdated. I agree. I agree with that 100%. You know, it was Alex who pushed it for Denise because Denise felt she needed it. But maybe once James, she starts using it and realizes. We will be able to talk to parents through a text message, and Nala said to have a thread.
Forms to threads where you get status updates on where we are with the form process. And we give you the form and you put it out there for us. You do it as included in the plan. And so far, we've had to do our own pages. So how is a form promised, but a page is not?
So it's just like, I don't think anybody got a clear understanding of what the service level agreement was. I think it was a lot of sales going on and not a lot of tech speak. Yes, I heard.
Yeah, that's on my plate.
Well, we're paid up through this year. So I think we take this year to figure out like if we wanna, you know, have a different solution or just stick with them. And just one thing, maybe. What we could, you know, it doesn't seem like it makes sense obviously for just parents to be managing this, but I do think that the website is pretty important to like recruitment and stuff like that so maybe if we can just take like, okay,
I don't know if there's a slippery slope, but take like, okay, fall we'll have, maybe we can come together with a few people supporting James or somebody else taking charge to like really get at least the pages, like. All the information updated, everything we need for like recruitment and stuff like that for like just this next round of recruitment and then that would be the number one priority for sure.
Well, that's up. I mean, the new website is up. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, but the content's old.
Like, we don't have new picture, right? Am I right, James? It's just the stuff that was migrated over from the old site. And it hasn't even been formatted. It's just like long text. Yeah, exactly. And we don't have a plan for when to format that either.
So I think Kristen's right. That does seem to be like, at least, because, as Brooke says, we've paid for a year. We gotta use this for the cycle that we paid for, and it should have content that reflects the school today. So it seems like that's the first stage of this. And then in tandem with, or second stage is,
Denise, Dianthi, what's that guy's name, Jack, is the website doing what you had hoped it would do? Are you using it the way that you and if you didn't if it's not then How are we transitioning to this other, whatever, James 2.0 or something else? I just distinctly remember our conversation of you saying, I'm like, this is not my, I can't have this be my part-time, full-time job.
And so I want to make sure that that's happening. I made a project at home for a family server. So, like, what happens to me as a 40-year-old man? After I pass, how does Felicia get all of my stuff out of iCloud, Google, all of these different services that I'm subscribed to?
Basically, I had to set up a home server that is set up for her to access this stuff. We can still use it to share stuff like our calendar. We can add notes to each other. We've got a grocery list. We've got a scraper that gives the cheapest eggs in Bushwick.
We just find out what the grocery store we need to go to. Just all these little one-off things. Baby pictures, drawings that Roman did that we don't want to keep up with anymore, and it just needs to go on a hard drive, and it needs to be something that's just plug into the wall, connect to the internet, and it's there, and it never changes.
You can take it anywhere. You can clone it. You can unplug it, plug it back in, and it'll just work. It needs to be something that can survive any parent and that any parent can just pick up with minimal... Education. Felicia has got to be able to use it. She's not tech savvy. She's got to be able to figure it out or the Bitcoin wallet is locked in. And you're saying same deal, same deal for the website. Same deal. We run it out the PTA room. Yes. Yeah.
Well, bump that email that you sent with a request for status update to me and Brooke. We'll amplify. Let's get another meeting on the books for this next stage. And maybe we add a committee? Well, the plan for that meeting, for me... Website and social...
Yes, so like we come up with all just take the whole list and put each one of them into the support ticket. and ask them to do it. And then see what all they'll do, and then the ones that they reject, then we just aggregate them, and we decide how we're going to divvy it up amongst the committee.
Okay, okay guys, I have to go. I'm sorry. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did too. This sounds pressing. So thank you James. No, no, no. I'm going to take that same methodology and work on the grants like that too. Like figure out what is the easiest grant to get us and make a whole list and then rank them from one to ten easiest to hardest and then start with the easiest and then work our way down the list.
That's great. I'll share with you that I think we should do the DOE sustainability grant, which is kind of like the lower hanging fruit for outdoor learning and gardening and play, and it's $5,000 for the garden. I think that would be an easy thing to do.
The grant opens in September, so I'll let you know about that. So we just need to get the required documents together. That's the slowest thing, finding out the paperwork, where it is that they need. So we can have that on and we can make it fast. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Oh, I have a one of me too.
Stephanie, I'm going to email you. I need to ask you about some off-topic stuff. Okay. All right. Bye, y'all. Bye. Thank you, everybody. Bye, Selena. Bye. Ciao. Can't wait to see you guys. I know. We still need to hang out before school starts too, so.
Yeah, we both. I'll text you when we get home. Okay. Yeah. Bye.