Last Minute PTO Alerts!
Escalatory time-sensitive language and exclamation points cannot be ignored!
You can listen to an audio-version of this post by clicking the play button above.
Four Things to Know
The Sunshine Committee wants to help your kids make their own Valentine’s Day cards for their lovely and talented and dedicated teachers, but we still need a couple of adult volunteers to oversee the process. Please do join us on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday morning if you are able! Click here to sign up.
You can now buy Learning Leopards gear by clicking right here!
We are still looking for a Bingo Prize Room corporate sponsor (or two) for our Silent Auction fundraiser. If you work for or own or otherwise have a connection to a local business that is able to help out, please contact Laura Jordan.
Also, don’t forget about our Fuzzy’s Taco Shop fundraiser on Tuesday night, February 13! Eat at Fuzzy’s in Fifth Street Station from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., drop your receipt in the correct basket next to the register, and the PTO will receive 15% of proceeds. Thanks!
Would You Like to Know More?
Everything you need to know has been communicated. Just click those links up there and feel free to move on with your day.
When I was in high school—approximately 897 years ago, so 1997 through 2001—the Student Government Association or the yearbook kids or somebody ran a Valentine’s Day fundraiser every year that involved the selling of carnations. You could buy white or pink or red and maybe yellow carnations for a dollar apiece and have them delivered to friends or enemies or whomever you wanted to on Valentine’s Day—as long as whomever you wanted to was one of the 3,300 or so people who worked at or attended our school. I sincerely can’t remember if I ever received any—it seems unlikely—but I did send my best friend ten separate “secret admirer” carnations—not as a bundle, but ten different ones, so that it looked like he had ten different secret admirers, which, for all I know, he did, but I certainly didn’t know who they were, and I was not among them. I just suspected it would be funny when my quiet and unassuming and kinda nerdy friend got a whole bouquet of carnations delivered to him during homeroom. And I was right. It was, in fact, funny. I wasn’t even there, because we weren’t in the same homeroom, but I’m pretty sure it was funny.
Do schools still do the carnations thing? I remember it feeling very FRAUGHT and thick with DRAMA and discomfort, what with nearly all of us being self-involved weirdos convinced that most of what everyone else was thinking about all the time was our own selves, because social media did not, it may surprise you to learn, invent “being a teenager”—though maybe there’s a case to be made that social media did freeze us all in pre-adult amber. Anyway, the whole carnation-donation scheme seems like it could have been dreamed up in a lab to produce the inevitable reinforcement of the existing social hierarchy that it did, with all the cool kids (and my best friend) getting a bunch of flowers and the rest of us playing the supporting cast, just there to fill out the scene. I imagine lots of feelings were hurt and some people felt left out and tears were shed and many a diary page was filled, and it seems like the sort of thing we’re much more sensitive about these days—for better and for worse, probably. Pain and joy and longing and hope and disappointment and jealousy and embarrassment are all perfectly natural emotions we all have to figure out how to deal with at some point, yes, but surely teenagers get enough of that on their own, don’t they? Do they need a lab-grown injection of it on Valentine’s Day on top of the already supercharged tragicomedy that is a normal high school day? And why? So that the SGA has a few hundred extra bucks to spend on prom, or whatever? Probably not!
The carnation conspiracy to make us all feel bad about ourselves when we were sixteen is a rather far step from the tear-off cards and pink pencils and Skittles spectacular that will be the Valentine’s Day exchange at Johnson this Wednesday. Most of us are still a few years away from being the parents of high schoolers, something I am looking forward to with all the excitement of Frederick Fleet atop the crow’s nest of the Titanic immediately after he first spotted the iceberg. For the glorious now, Valentine’s Day is just a chance for our kids to do something nice for their classmates and teachers. In the spirit of that, Jenn Maeng, like a ferocious sunshine birddog, is organizing an opportunity for your kids to make Valentine’s Day cards for their teachers in the cafeteria before school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings. We just need a couple of extra pairs of hands to keep things organized. If you have thirty minutes to spare on one of those mornings, from 7:30 until 8:00 a.m., please help us out!
Here’s the SignUp Genius link again. Thanks!
An Interview with a Sweatshirt Enthusiast
The PTO now has a Learning Leopards merch store, but you have to act quickly if you want to get your gear as soon as possible. This store prints and ships our orders in batches, and the first batch closes out in just two days! (There will of course be another batch after that, but act now if you’re really hankering for a new pullover.) There are sweatshirts and t-shirts in youth and adult sizes.
Click here to shop Learning Leopards gear.
The PTO does not get much of a cut from these sales. We have decided to keep our end rather low in an effort to keep the items as affordable as possible. (They’re already on the expensive end.) We hope to figure out a way to meet the demand for Johnson gear in a way that is more economical for you and more lucrative for us in the future. For now, this is what we have.
Please note: If you see gift cards on the store site, those are added by the merchandise company, and the purchase of those does not help the PTO. That’s just a gift card to spend more money on that website. If you want to just send us money, you can do so via our Venmo. Otherwise, stick to the shirts and tees.
To celebrate the launch of the new Johnson Learning Leopards spring line, we have arranged an exclusive interview with Johnson third-grader and noted sweatshirt enthusiast Katie Howard. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Katie, thanks for joining us. Tell me, what is it that you like so much about sweatshirts?
What? They’re cozy? I mean, yeah. They’re warm. I don’t know—I just wear one like all the time.
How many sweatshirts would you say that you have?
Like ten or something? Maybe eight?
Is that enough sweatshirts?
Yeah. I’d like more. Like, fuzzy ones.
Have you had a chance to look at the new Learning Leopards shirts at the Johnson store?
Yessss.
And what do you think of those?
Cool.
What do you think of the dark heather crewneck sweatshirt?
That’s a good one. Yeah. That’s the one I would probably pick. The black one seems nice, too.
How about t-shirts? Do you and your friends also like t-shirts?
Yes.
If you could pair a Learning Leopards t-shirt with a Learning Leopards sweatshirt, would you wear those on the same day?
Maybe. I mean, if it’s like sixty degrees outside, then yes.
Can you think of anything you don’t like about sweatshirts?
Welllll, sometimes, when you have to pull them over your head, and you have a bun in your hair, it messes up your bun. So zippers are good.
Well, we’ll take that into consideration when we’re coming up with the next line of gear for the store.
Okay.
Do you think your friends would like these Johnson Learning Leopards t-shirts and sweatshirts?
Yeah.
Do you think they’ll be popular in the school?
Yeah.
Well, thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate your perspective…on sweatshirts.
You’re welcome.
And we’ll talk to you soon.
Cool, bye.
Don’t forget Fuzzy’s!
Finally, just one more reminder about the Fuzzy’s Taco Shop fundraiser this Tuesday. All you have to do is get dinner at Fuzzy’s in Fifth Street Station on Tuesday, February 13 between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. and the PTO will get a portion of the sales. Just be sure to drop your receipt in the basket next to the register so your meal gets counted towards our total. Thanks!
If you’re reading this before the Super Bowl tonight, enjoy the game! The official position of the PTO is to hope for an exciting, close contest that is decided in the final moments, hopefully before 10:00 p.m. eastern, and that there are no commercials that require careful conversations with either grandparents or children. Then we can all get a good night’s rest before making hundreds of Valentine’s Day cards in the cafeteria tomorrow morning.
Talk to you soon!