Livonia PTSA Council Courier

Can you believe it's already May?!?! What an exciting time of year! By now you are getting ready to or have already voted in next year's PTA/PTSA board members. It's never too late to start thinking about next year and what it could bring. While everyone is getting ready for end of the year celebrations, now is the time to start planting the seed in family, staff, and community members' minds on why it's so important to become a PTA/PTSA member. How can you gain even more members? Does anyone have any ideas for incentives for next year? When and how will you start your membership drive? How will you acquire 100% staff members? The possibilities are endless! Let's see how many more members you can gain next year compared to this year!

Kindly,

Nicole Dant

Treasurer and Membership Chair, Livonia PTSA Council

Some units may choose to begin selling PTA memberships for next school year before the end of this year (i.e. kindergarten round up, new student orientation nights, family events, etc.). Selling memberships in advance will only automatically show up in Givebacks for the units who have sold memberships in advance with previous years. If a unit would like to begin selling memberships in advance for the 2025-2026 school year and they do not see this as an option in Givebacks, these are the steps to follow:

1. Reach out to support through Givebacks to ask to have 2025-2026 memberships added to your unit's website.

2. Once this step is completed, it is highly recommended that a membership for the 2025-2026 school year is purchased to ensure it is correctly enabled before sharing the link with other members. If an error message occurs, reach out to support again.

3. If your unit has amended the bylaws to change the cost of membership for next year, you MUST update this amount in Givebacks as well.

4. Units that sell advance memberships will receive the payout with their next weekly payout (so you may want to consider having a separate line item in your budget for next year’s membership dues). State and national dues for these advance memberships will need to be paid after July 1st.

We have closed out PEP for the year and our first place winner is Coolidge!! Our second place winner is Kennedy and our third place winner is Buchanan!! Well done to all three boards!

The current standings are below. If you feel like some points haven’t been entered please reach out and we can get any mistakes or omissions corrected. You can email me at pep@livoniaptsacouncil.org

Keadin Parish

Livonia PTSA Council PEP chair

Summer Leadership Academy (SLA) returns Saturday, August 9th in Rochester – This event is completely focused on PTA leader training. Registration discounts are available for you to bring your whole board. We are also planning a track for Council leaders. More details coming soon, but you can register at any time!

Closing the Year with Celebration and Gratitude at Buchanan

As the school year draws to a close, we’re excited to celebrate our amazing students, staff, and families with a series of joyful end-of-year events!

Get ready for Spring Fling, where the schoolyard will come alive with inflatables, carnival games, a splash tower bucket chair, and a petting zoo — fun for the whole family!

During Staff Appreciation Week, we’ll show our gratitude to our incredible teachers and staff with special touches like catered lunches, an omelette bar, flower bouquets, and heartfelt thank-you notes from students and families.

We’ll also be bidding a fond farewell to our fabulous fourth graders, and honoring the dedicated fourth grade parents who have given so much to our school community over the years.

We can’t wait to celebrate together!

We wrapped up our read-a-thon at the end of March. Students read and logged over 141,000 minutes over the three week period! The top classroom in each grade won $40 worth of new games and activities for indoor recess and the top weekly reader in each classroom won a free spirit stick. These incentives created some friendly competition between students and classrooms which encouraged some extra reading to win the prizes.

This past month we celebrated our students who participated in Youth Making a Difference. We had 206 students participate! With our school-wide "Comfort for a Cause" project, we were able to donate 128 blankets to Sinai Grace Hospital along with over 150 cards made by our youngest students! These blankets and cards are being distributed to patients in the hospital who could use some extra encouragement and comfort while they are recovering from injury or illness. With the help of our amazing parent and grandparent volunteers we were able to give any student who wanted to participate at least one opportunity to do so. We are so proud of all of our Coolidge Cougars who are making a difference in our community!

April was National Autism Acceptance month and our DEI chair has set up another fun and engaging bulletin board for our school. The board has a graphic novel feel and we hope students will have an opportunity to stop by and spend a few minutes reading the brief story.

At our April meeting, we were able to elect our executive board for next year. We would like to introduce our 2025-2026 PTA executive board:

President - Melissa Austin

1st Vice President - Stephanie Street

2nd Vice President - Sara Jones

Secretary - Jess Marcou

Treasurer - Jenna Kuhn

We are gearing up for our summer reading book fair that is sponsored by a grant secured through the district! The PTA is running this fair for our media center and we cannot wait to see the joy on our students' faces as they all get to walk away with five new books for free!

Mark your calendars NOW for Officer’s Training and the Audit Party!

2025

MAY

5/21 – Officer Training | 6-8 p.m. | Frost Middle School

JUNE

6/11 – LPTSA Council Meeting | 6-8 p.m. | Central Office

JULY

7/16 – Audit Party | 6-8 p.m. | Central Office

AUGUST

8/20 – LPTSA Council Meeting | 6-8 p.m. | Central Office

If you are a PTA/PTSA officer or committee chair, please make sure to join our group for important information, discussions, and more! Be sure to answer the questions when you request to join. A lot of great information is shared on this closed group page. It's also a great way to network with other units, share ideas, and ask for help.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/541318689333449/

Michigan PTA Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/everychildonevoice

National PTA Website: https://www.pta.org/

National PTA Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/ParentTeacherAssociation

National PTA Blog: https://onevoice.pta.org/

The Livonia PTSA Council is a group of 22 local PTA/PTSA Units within the Livonia Public Schools District. The Council is organized under the authority of the Michigan PTA for the purpose of promoting conferences, communications, leadership development and coordination of the efforts of the local units.

Interested in joining Council? There are chair opportunities available! Contact President Mandy Gerstenbrand at president@livoniaptsacouncil.org

Email: newsletter@livoniaptsacouncil.org
Website: www.livoniaptsacouncil.org
Location: 15125 Farmington Road, Livonia, MI, USA
Facebook: facebook.com/LivoniaPTSACouncil
Twitter: @LivoniaPTSAC