Nova Roots Meeting
January 18th, 7pm
Follow up on issues from past meetings
The December thank you coffee/pastry for staff went well; there was an e-card for families to write messages of thanks and support to staff. We will do more of these in future if budget allows. Thanks to Deb!
Eyva requested that we disable the old Google doc that used to list teacher requests; they are not using it anymore, there is a new process; Wendy will disable links to it on Nova Roots website.
Open house dates: 1/12 6-7pm; 1/22 4-5:30pm; all via Zoom; there is a Nova open house web site that recruitment committee and others have created:
https://novaopenhouse.wixsite.com/virtualopenhouse/nova-online
Nova Roots presence on social media: Eyva suggested we keep the Nova Roots website up to date and not start new social media channels. Wendy is on this.
Wendy would like to update the front page of the Nova Roots website with a donate link and more, https://novaroots.org. Anyone have ideas?
The group hopes a student could act as a liaison with Nova Roots; Eyva is happy to put out a request for this. What would this look like? What would we want this person to do? Attend the Nova Roots parent meetings; we’d need someone who’d know what the students want, and can be a source of information about the school, events, etc. It’s difficult for us parents to know much about what is going on in the building, and having student connection could help bridge this, since teachers and staff are maxed out!
We should advertise the monthly-or-so principal office hours in the regular Mailchimp messages, as well as the intergenerational book group. More discussion on a newsletter: Who is our audience? (Parents, alums, people who want to donate money!) Can we send more targeted messages? How can we better connect? Erin had many good ideas: have a specific goal for each message rather than a laundry list of things all in one message, one specific thing per message.
Could we text people? We’d have to have people opt in with their phone numbers, like they opt in for the newsletter with their email addresses.
Idea: virtual bake sale; people could pre-order baked goods.
Is there a priority funding goal, something more tangible? Erin had lots of specific suggestions for this and for fundraising.
Idea for online auction; art auctions were popular at Nova in the past.
And we need more info from Susan Watters and Eyva about priorities, how much is needed?
Tutoring website wants to partner with us somehow for fundraising (and presumably business from Nova students); https://www.bansho.com/ What are the ethics around this? Discussion, we’d have to run this by Eyva. Are there SPS rules? Caitlin will forward to Eyva. Maybe they could “sponsor” an event by paying a certain amount of money; this is something that happens all the time in the school fundraising world.
Food bank stuff: Nova is now on the Northwest Harvest advocacy team’s list (thanks to Caitlin) to potentially get grocery store gift cards in the future. We don’t know how this will pan out, we’ll have to see; it could be really good. Byrd Barr food bank continues to donate food weekly to the Nova pantry, which is open to all.
Nova is not yet ready for in person volunteers; folks can still do all the SPS online volunteer forms, background checks, etc to get ready for when it does become possible.
Still on the radar for the future: having neighborhood-based Nova family gatherings, as was done in the past, as a way to create community; maybe next fall?
When is the next meeting? Feburary 15th. Third Tuesday.
Coming up for next meeting: figure out timeline for fundraiser; if online art auction, we’ll need to do planning, connecting with students and staff about the art; marketing; we’d have to get on this soon to make it happen in the late spring. We should divide and conquer; would be great to have at least one student, one teacher on this project. Caitlin will reach out to Eyva and Lance about feasibility of art auction, teacher coffees, and more.