Fall Picnic is on, Change Challenge is rolling, and an invitation to JACKFEST

It's Happening dot GIF

The Short of It

1. The Fall Picnic is happening this Tuesday, October 8, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. behind the school. Join us!

2. The Change Challenge is underway! Please continue to send your kids to school with change and money to donate to the PTO!

3. JACKFEST—a family-friendly festival to raise money to support families fighting childhood cancer—is happening on Sunday, October 20, from noon to 4:00 p.m. at Foxfield.

4. Doughnut and movie ticket fundraisers still going.

The Slightly Longer of It

The Fall Picnic is on Tuesday! Please join us at Johnson at 5:00 for a couple of hours of autumnal fun. We’ll provide the hot dogs, but be sure to bring a side dish or a treat to share or just pack some stuff for your family to munch on. There will be games and activities for the kids, and it’s a great opportunity to gather and chat with the Johnson community on what (finally!) looks to be a beautiful fall evening. We can’t wait to see you there!

Change Challenge Update

The Change Challenge fundraiser is halfway over, and second grade has sprinted out to an early lead. After spending much of the weekend counting coins and running the various numbers through our extremely complicated proprietary scoring system*, here are the current standings:

1st Place, with 13,806 points — Second Grade
2nd Place, with 10,134 points — Fourth Grade
3rd Place, with 9,985 points — First Grade
4th Place, with 9,054 points — Third Grade
5th Place, with 5,946 points — Kindergarten

*The system is not complicated. Every cent in a jug counts as one point, unless that cent comes in the form of a penny, in which case it counts as negative one point. So, you should tell your kids to put all the PENNIES in the jugs of the other grades, and ALL OTHER MONEY in their own grade’s jug.

We’re off to a pretty good start, but we have a long way to go to catch last year’s total, so please keep the change—and the paper money!—rolling in. There’s just five days left to contribute, and the winning grade gets an ice cream party and the chance to turn Principal Mickens into a human sundae! Thanks for your help!

JACKFEST is Coming Soon!

Below is the blurb about JACKFEST from those lovely people putting on JACKFEST. Following the blurb, a brief personal message from your humble PTO correspondent.

JackFest 2024 (10/20/24)  Charlottesville's favorite family festival is back this Fall and will be held at Foxfield on Sunday, October 20th from 12:00-4:00pm. Admission is free and everyone is welcome! All the proceeds from the event will once again benefit our local Ronald McDonald House and pediatric oncology at the UVA Children's Hospital. The festival will include a Kid's Superhero Dash, Kid's Cross Country races (new in '24), bounce houses & slides, a truck touch, arts and crafts and more!

A few weeks ago I hit a line drive right into the chest of a pediatric cancer survivor. To be fair to me, I didn’t know he was a pediatric cancer survivor at the time—to me, he’s Jack, my regular second baseman on my daughter’s minor league baseball team that plays down at Quarry Park. And, of course, the point is not that I hit a pediatric cancer survivor in the chest with a baseball, but that I smacked a line drive into the chest of a child—which makes me a less than perfect little league baseball coach, but not someone out specifically to do harm to survivors of pediatric cancer.

I was trying to get the ball out to right field, and I caught too much of the barrel. Jack took three quick steps to his left, got his glove up a second too late, and took the ball in the upper left part of his chest, almost to his shoulder. He dropped right into the dirt. I knew he was going to be fine, but figured he was hurting pretty good. I felt two things at once—awful, and proud.

Awful, obviously, because it was a mistake on my part. I hit the ball a little harder than I wanted to, and to the wrong spot. He was hurting because of something I did. Me! His coach, whom he trusts and I think occasionally even likes. What a jerk!

I was proud because Jack only took that ball off the chest because he took three quick steps to get in front of the ball to try to keep it on the infield. I was proud of him because he made a baseball play. He knocked it down, even if the ball knocked him down, too. He writhed a bit on the ground, but he got up. He kept practicing. The kid is tough.

Just this afternoon, Jack became the last out of our game, sliding into home plate. The pitcher threw a pitch that got away from the catcher, and Jack took off from third base for home. I was coaching third base, and he was gone before I could even think to tell him to stop. He very nearly made it, too, but the catcher recovered just in time to basically punch Jack right in the face with his glove as Jack was sliding in under the tag. It was an awesome baseball play, but Jack was out, and the game was over.

What I loved about Jack tearing down the third base line for home is how instinctively he did it. He saw the ball get away from the catcher, and he was gone, immediately up to top speed, and digging hard for home. His slide was sublime. Feet thrown out from under him, body leaned back, arms spread, head up—a real slide. And then the glove to the face, and the out call, yes. But a beautiful baseball play nonetheless, born of the true and good baseball instincts of a wiry little eight-year-old kid who wanted to score a run for his team.

I wish I could have seen it from the reverse angle, but I know the face he was making as he chugged for home, because I watched him make that face a lot last spring and again this fall. When he wants something, when he is determined to do something, you can read it all over his face and body language as clear as words printed on the page. Jack vibrates with determination when he wants something.

He’s not always vibrating with that determination, though, and he’s got body language and a face for that, too. He’s a kid! Sometimes they need a little motivation, and sometimes they just need a little space to seek the motivation for themselves. But when he wants it, everyone watching knows. I told his dad that he might be twice as good a ballplayer when he’s angry. When he gets mad, or even just pretends to be mad, you can see every muscle in his body go taut with how much he wants to do the thing, whatever it is.

I don’t know where that fight comes from. I don’t know if he’s always had it, because I’ve known him for less than a year. I don’t know if it’s something he learned through multiple rounds of high-dose chemo and stem-cell transplants over the course of months in the hospital, or the reason he made it through all that to come out the other side an awesome, determined kid—and a mean ballplayer, to boot.

I also can’t imagine what going through all of that—cancer diagnosis, treatment, time away from home—was like for Jack’s family. My family has been incredibly fortunate to mostly avoid life-deranging events like that one, through sheer random luck. What seems clear, though, is that every time I hear a story about how someone made it through one of these life-deranging events, it is because a whole community sprang up to help them through it. It seems to me that even as we might be spending more time home alone, and less time out in the community, we are still, collectively, pretty good about coming together for one another when the need arises.

Jack’s family leaned on the Ronald McDonald House of Charlottesville and the Pediatric Oncology program at UVA’s Children’s Hospital and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to get them through this—and I’m sure the love and support of their friends and family, too. None of us can do hardly any of this alone. JACKFEST raises money for the organizations that helped Jack and his family when they needed it most. What a wonderful thing they have done, after all they went through, to create something that exists just to help others in need. I am, as always, in awe of the capacity of those around me to do, and to do good, in the face of adversity. To stretch every muscle in the body taut with want and determination, and to fight for it.

So, go check out JACKFEST on October 20! It looks like a really fun event. I promise not to hit any pediatric cancer survivors, or other children, with baseballs.

Ongoing Fundraisers

By clicking the button below, you can buy a dozen Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnuts for $15. Technically, you’re buying a code that you then take to any Krispy Kreme in the country, and then you show the code to the nice people behind the counter and they have to give you a dozen doughnuts. The best part is that for every dozen doughnuts you buy, the PTO gets a cool $7.50. This is great for us, so order away!

By clicking this other button below, you can order two movie tickets for $30 for use at any Regal Cinemas location nationwide. If you’re going to the movies, or planning to one day go to the movies, just order through that link and the PTO will get a chunk of your purchase price. Too easy!

And there’s always just our Venmo. Feel like throwing us some cash? Click the button!