Next PTO Meeting is this Tuesday at Greenstone on 5th!
And thanks for a great Silent Auction and Bingo Night!
Thank you to everyone who joined us at Johnson on Friday evening for a fun and spectacularly successful fundraising event—with your help, we raised over $8,500 for our school! Great work!
An aside: counting the header and subtitle up there, I’ve now started this message with four consecutive exclamatory sentences! This must be quite the exciting PTO news update! And now it’s six! Ahh! I’ve done it again! How can I possibly escape this vicious cycle?! AHHHH NOT WITH AN INTERROBANG!1
Ahem. The Silent Auction raised a nice pile of cash, and the kids had an absolute blast playing bingo in both the raucous cafeteria atmosphere and the more soothing environs of the sensory-friendly room down the hall. At long last, our AI leopard bingo caller can rest easy.
Special thanks to all of our parent volunteers who helped in setting up, keeping things running, and cleaning up afterwards. You know who you are! And of course a big preemptive thank you to all the teachers who will, in the coming weeks, be giving the kids who won all those exciting experiences we auctioned off a really great time. It means a great deal to them!
The PTO’s work continues, though! We will be meeting at the Greenstone on 5th Community Center on Tuesday, March 18 at 6:00 p.m. Topics to be discussed include an auction and bingo recap, planning the upcoming second green-top spring dance party, and a bingo night fundraiser at Random Row coming up this summer. Dinner will be provided, so stop by and say hello! We’re always looking for new ideas for how we can best serve the school, its hardworking staff and teachers, and ultimately our kids.
Hope to see you there!
A further aside: In the early days of online communication, I steadfastly refused to use exclamation marks in my writing. I found them either aggressive or cheesy and unnecessary and inauthentic. But the exclamation mark has now become such a vital tool in digital communication of all forms to express almost the opposite sentiment that it was once generally meant to convey. We use the exclamation mark now to ensure that we are being understood as polite and chipper, rather than demanding. It’s practically a smiley-face emoji, the way it’s deployed in the common digital tongue. Just take a look at the last line of this message, above the footnote. “Hope to see you there!” That’s clearly meant to be polite, light, airy. Twenty-five years ago it would probably have been seen as a bit rude! Now look at this: “Hope to see you there.” If I ended this message with a period, it would almost certainly take on the tone of scolding or guilt-tripping, as though the period, of all things, is somehow foreboding. Kinda weird, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now, imagine if one of my boomer parents had written this message, and signed it off with that most inscrutable punctuation of all: the dreaded ellipsis. “Hope to see you there…” becomes almost threatening!