MES PTA 2025 Spring Annual General Meeting

Dear Magnolia Families,

We’re excited to share our proposed PTA budget for the 2025–2026 school year. Building on a year of exceptional community support and generosity, we’re aiming even higher to meet the growing needs of our students, staff, and school. Thanks to our overwhelming fundraising success this year we will end the year net positive by ~$17,000 excluding Move-a-Thon. This offsets the negative net budget (-$9,710) proposed for next year. Here’s a summary of key changes and a look at how we’re making strategic choices to directly support learning and wellbeing.

🌟 Continued Growth in Fundraising

Thanks to your incredible support, our annual giving campaign this year raised 40% more than the previous year—an amazing show of community strength. For next year, we’re setting a fundraising target of $95,000 (excluding Move-a-Thon), which is roughly a 10% increase from this year. We believe this goal is achievable with continued enthusiasm and engagement from our families.

🧠 Investing in Student Support: A Half-Time Float Teacher

Our most significant proposed investment is to help fund a half-time certified float teacher, which we see as a crucial step toward strengthening academic and emotional support across the school.

Think of this role as a vice principal-lite: a versatile educator who can step in where needed—whether that’s covering classrooms, helping with social-emotional issues, or supporting students with behavioral or academic challenges. This teacher will help alleviate the heavy administrative burdenon Principal Kelly, who oversees approximately 60 direct reports. By sharing the load, she can remain more present in classrooms and accessible to staff, while our teachers can focus on what they do best—teaching.

The PTA would contribute $45,000 toward this position (including benefits), covering 50% of the cost. The school will fund the remaining half.

📚 Curriculum & Academic Resources

While the iReady digital learning platform is no longer available, we will continue using Phonics-Based Magnetic Reading workbooks for literacy support, at a cost of $8,500. These high-impact tools remain a core part of our literacy instruction.

We are also proposing to continue supporting a reading tutor ($14,400) and a math tutor ($7,200), which will help reduce class sizes during core learning and enable teachers to give more small group and differentiated learning instruction.

👩🏽‍🦱 Supporting Safer, Calmer Recess and Lunch

We’re also proposing to fund two lunch and recess monitors at $14,400 each, for a total of $28,800. These positions are key to ensuring that our students have a safe, structured environment during breaks—preventing issues before they arise and giving teachers more time to prepare for learning.

✏️ Streamlining Other Budget Areas

To focus our spending on what matters most:

• Field trips will no longer be covered by the PTA, and instead will be organized and funded through SchoolPay by individual classrooms. With the exception of the 5th grade overnight Islandwood trip where the PTA pays the deposit.
• We are reducing the classroom supplies budget slightly ($300/classroom to $100/classroom), but we will continue to support additional core needs as they arise.

Together, these changes represent a thoughtful rebalancing of our priorities—one that meets today’s challenges with a clear focus on student success, teacher support, and community wellbeing.

Thank you for your continued trust and commitment to making Magnolia a thriving place to learn and grow.

Warmly,
Your Magnolia PTA Board