Bingo at Johnson on Bingo Night, Friday, March 14!
Bingo. Bingo? Bingo! Bingo?! BINGO!!!
Bingo Night Friday, March 14, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Bingo Night is the most fun my daughter has at Johnson every year. This is not to say that she didn’t have all sorts of fun in the instructive and stimulating and loving environs that were the classrooms of the incomparable Mses./Mmes. Bigler, Irwin, Proffitt, and now Sills—of course she did! But coming to the school after hours, seeing the cafeteria transformed into a bingo hall, and (after a rousing BINGO!) heading to a classroom practically overflowing with bingo prizes—this is the sort of outrageous fun you don’t get on an everyday basis! This is a transgression, a delightful breaking of norms that turns the safe and staid confines of the school building into an uproarious House of Chance and Thrills! And it’s free! Bring the family! It’s a really fun time for all.
Just look at what the AI robits think the evening is going to look like:
How could you possibly miss that?!
Sensory-Friendly Bingo Room
As promised above, Bingo Night in the Johnson cafeteria is a bit of a gloriously chaotic experience, and can be understandably overwhelming to some folks. Please don’t let concerns along those lines keep your kids from participating, as Youth Motility Enthusiast Randi Jennings is once again helping us put together a calmer and quieter bingo experience in a separate classroom. From the copy:
We're again offering a small, separate sensory friendly bingo room! Ms. Sills' classroom, room 206, will offer a quieter space, modified bingo pacing, and a limited number of people. The space will be reserved for Johnson students and their families for whom the cafeteria is overstimulating and significantly impacts their ability to participate.
If you believe this option would be beneficial to your student, please reach out to randi.dayton.jennings@gmail.com. Advance notice is not required, but space will be limited.
*This is a work in progress! If you have insights or would like to help facilitate, please email the address above.*
Auction Baskets still need filling!
Please do click the button below to see what we’re looking for to fill the big baskets that are among the most popular auction items every year. Nothing is too big or too small to go in one of these baskets, one way or another. Thanks!
Bingo Night Volunteers
We can’t have all the above-promised chaotic fun without a little help from our friends and neighbors. Please click the button below to sign up to help make the 2025 Silent Auction and Bingo Night the best yet.
Next PTO meeting rescheduled
The next PTO meeting will be Tuesday, March 18 at 6:00 p.m. at the Greenstone on 5th community center. Hope to see you there!
Mea Culpa
Your humble PTO news correspondent would like to publicly acknowledge that he was privately lightly scolded by THE POWERS THAT BE for last week using this space to encourage anyone interested to sign up their kids for Little League Baseball. Was this a violation of the sacred pact you entered into when you signed up to receive PTO news updates, and therefore violative of the sanctity of your email inbox? Yes! And for that I am deeply sorry. Whoops!
That said, by means of explaining myself: Little League baseball is, like the PTO, a volunteer-run non-profit that benefits local kids and our community. As I said last week:
…I have found these small, focused, volunteer-run community organizations to be the precise antidote to—and respite from—well, everything that is bad and chaotic in our broader politics and discourse. No matter how you perceive or define what is going wrong in the world, you can find a lot of what is right and good here, at the neighborhood level, where the remarkable humans around us are working together for the benefit of the kids and families who are our neighbors.
I do this silly PTO email writing because I believe that doing so helps strengthen the bonds between Johnson families and the Johnson staff and teachers. A big part of the PTO’s job is to try to less-than-annoyingly remind us all that our kids’ education is a collaborative process that requires the commitment and help of all of us in support of our kids’ teachers. It is a fundamental aspect of American civic life that I sincerely value—and so is youth sport! I think that an off-topic emailed encouragement to sign your kids up for baseball is simply an acknowledgement that the same folks you might see at after school pick-up are the same folks you’ll see down at our public baseball diamonds—an acknowledgement that strengthens our community fabric, even if it’s an email likely lost in the noise of your inbox. So is Little League Baseball off-topic from the usual strictures of the PTO newsletter? Of course! But the message and the missions are fundamentally compatible, if not strictly practically the same.
Either way, I only have a handful of these emails left before my daughter moves on from Johnson and I am the parent of a lower elementary school student nevermore, and someone else hopefully more respectful of PTO subject matter discipline will be tasked with these communiques. I once posted a whole Thoreau poem in this space, for goodness sake! Who needs that?!
Thanks for reading, and be sure to click the links above to help us out!
Talk to you soon.