I would like to thank three Chairpersons for their beginning-of-the-school-year efforts that started off the PTA on the right foot: 

· Holley Remer, Summer Quest Chair, for cheerfully managing the second year of our summer day camp, along with Russ Brown.  As most of you know, Summer Quest is a school-PTA partnership that generates net revenues that are earmarked for the acquisition of school technology.  The faculty and administration did an excellent job of expanding the class offerings. 

· Kristen Tiscione, School Kits Chair (assisted by Jackie Carney D'Aquila) for managing the School Kits program.  It is our first fundraiser of the year and provides a valuable service for parents, students, and teachers.

· Judy Williams, Sally Foster Chair, for bringing this excellent gift wrap and gift fundraising program to our parents.  The online ordering system is a great way to participate in this program. 

Open House was a great success thanks to:

· Kate Garcia, Back-to-School Folder Chair, for organizing the folder coordination.

· Beth Mahood, for helping people through the process of updating or creating their PTA Website accounts.  This becomes the basis for our online directory and our paper edition of the PTA Family Directory (one free copy to all PTA members). 

· Ann-Marie Turnage, Ice Cream Social Chair, for managing this fun treat that followed the Open House.

· And all of the volunteers who helped collate school kits and folders prior to the Open House and handled the sales of kits and memberships during the Open House. 

Of course, my job was made easier by:

· My fellow PTA Executive Committee members: Gina Manning, Vice President, Membership; Kristin Cabral, Vice President, Fundraising; Laura Przypyszny, Treasurer; and Amy Hollingworth, Secretary, for their support.

· Betty Ende, Immediate Past President, for her continuing guidance and advice.

· Brigette Peterson, our Cultural Events Chairperson, who already  has set up a great line-up of entertainment for the coming year.  Please remember that PM Kindergartners, parents, younger siblings, and caregivers are always invited to these shows.

Please remember to register your grocery cards so that Chesterbrook Elementary School is credited. The General Mills Box Tops for Education, and Giant, Safeway, and Harris Teeter shopping cards send checks directly to the school - and the great thing about this:  its corporate money based on your weekly shopping expenditures. 

We still have a few PTA Chair positions to fill.  Please see the article later in this newsletter for more information. Finally, thanks to everyone who filled out Volunteer forms and Room Parent forms.  The response we received this year was excellent! 

Greg Brandon, Chesterbrook PTA President

School Supply Kits

The following parents and students helped to assemble and sell the school supply kits: Allie Arnold, Nadia Boughanem, Clare Brandon, Greg Brandon, Allyson Burgess, Jennifer Clark, Grace Clifford, Jackie D'Aquila, Betsy Desmond, Tara Andringa Dunfee, Erika Eckrod, Betty Ende, Jennie Ende, Kate Garcia, Dana Giddens, Genevieve Glista, Amy Hollingworth, Meg Hunt, Kim Johnson, Anna Joss, Michelle Joss, Ann Liu, Ella Koehl, Elena Lagos, Gail Lively, Kaela Mahoney, Gina Manning, Stephanie Manning, Meagan McArthur, Hanna Park, Candy Penn, Laurie Plishker, Michael Robbins, Mashana Sangdee, Spencer Sims, Amy Spangler, Sarah Spulak, Joey Sullivan, Ann-Marie Turnage, Judy Williams, Anne Williams, Emily Williams, John Williams, and Mary Zwirb. Without their help, the job would never have been done so quickly.  Thank you.

Thanks also to our PTA President, Greg Brandon, and Kurt Kohls for continuing to improve the PTA website and to make access to supply lists, on-line sales, PTA membership renewals, and volunteering so easy.  

A huge thank you also goes out to Jackie D'Aquila, my co-chair, who managed Open House sales, and our PTA Treasurer, Laura Przypyszny, whose ability to keep track of and reconcile the dollars and cents of a project this complicated is inspiring!

Thanks to Ms. Jorgensen, Mrs. Wynne, Mrs. Kelly, Ms. Butler, Ms. Antignano, Mrs. Vallath, Mrs. He, and Mr. Brown for being the summer teacher contacts for school supplies and helping me navigate this process.  I appreciated your responsiveness and assistance.  

Finally, a very special thank you goes to Linda Barnard in the front office who, as always, was cheerful, considerate, and helpful with regard to this PTA effort.  This is my last of 14 years at Chesterbrook, and I will miss her.

School Store

The school store was open the first 2 weeks of school.  Many, many thanks to Betty Ende, Gina Manning, and Jennifer Clark for staffing the store. 

The school store is closed for the remainder of the year.  The PTA will be selling assignment notebooks, computer headphones, recorders, and other "unique items" throughout the year as long as supplies last.  See items for sale posted on the store door.  Please send any supply orders to kkt7@law.georgetown.edu.  The supplies will be delivered to your child's classroom the following Monday.

Sally Foster Update 

Thanks to all of you who have ordered products so far this season.  As a reminder, BOTH paper and online orders are due on September 30^th.   Order online, save paper and get free shipping on all orders over $70.  All online orders will be shipped directly to you.

Here are a few suggestions and reminders:

· If you're ordering via the catalog order form, please remember that all checks must be payable to Chesterbrook PTA, not to Sally Foster, that you should NOT SEND CASH and that you should return BOTH copies of the order form to us when you order.  We will return the carbon to you in one of your order boxes.  Families who retain their carbon copies frequently lose them, making it impossible to check their orders for accuracy.  We will not provide a photocopy in place of your carbon copy.

· Orders will be ready for pickup on November 3 and 4.  These are the days of fall parent-teacher conferences.  Please plan to pick up your order when you meet with your child's teacher or stop by school another time during the week to pick up your order.  Orders are generally quite bulky, making them impossible for a child to handle on a school bus.

· The order delivery area is FOR ADULTS ONLY.  When orders are delivered, we sort them carefully by grade and teacher name so that you can more easily find your order when you come to pick it up.  The best way to keep this area in order is to make it a student-free zone.  We appreciate your understanding.

· When you pick up your order, be sure you pick up ALL the boxes in your order.  If your order is large, it's especially likely to be in more than one box.  And, if you order candy as well as wrapping paper, for example, those two items will be delivered in two boxes because food items are stored in and shipped from a different warehouse.

· Order changes and corrections will be due by Friday, November 14, which makes it important that you pick up and check over your order promptly.  Change/correction instructions will be inside one of your order boxes.

· If you're new to ordering online, you need to register your child as an online seller at www.sallyfoster.com.  Our account number is 503995.  Be sure to jot down your child's seller ID number, as it will come in handy if you ask other people to order online and give your child credit.  Also be sure to save the password that you choose, as it will be your password for all Sally Foster sales for years to come.

· If you registered your child and ordered online before, you'll need to know your password from previous years to update your seller account.  If you don't remember it, don't worry.  When your get into the Sally Foster website, you'll be able to ask them to send you your password.

· Past online registrants will need to update their student's information, including their homeroom teacher, which you can do by clicking on the "Account" tab at the top of the seller page.

· Even if you order online, your child's prizes will be delivered to school, so please try to pick them up when you come for your parent-teacher conference on November 3 or 4.

If you miss the September 30^th deadline for the "official" sale, Sally Foster continues to give Chesterbrook PTA 50% of profit for orders placed until January 15, 2010.  So if you find yourself suddenly short of holiday wrapping paper in early December, you can still get Sally Foster paper AND earn some funds for our school.

If you have questions or problems, please don't hesitate to contact Judy Williams 703.442.3984 or jandjwilliams@yahoo.com.

By: Susie French

Those of you who are new to Chesterbrook might be interested in how the
lunch program works. Every student is given a lunch account number to use when purchasing a school lunch. The account works like a debit card and once the balance goes below THREE lunches, your child will be given a green sticker to wear home to remind you to immediately replenish your child's lunch account.  Please be sure to remind your child to keep the sticker on and to give you the sticker when he/she gets home so you know to replenish his/her lunch fund.  The cafeteria staff alerted me that stickers are sometimes found stuck to the table or put in the trash.  I've included an example of the sticker so you know what to expect. 

A great tool to help ensure your child's lunch account doesn't run out of money is a service available to all FCPS schools called mylunchmoney.com. This service allows parents to put money on their child(ren)'s lunch account through a secure online account and can be set to replenish the account automatically OR to send an email alert when the balance on the lunch account goes below a certain level.  Parents can manage all their children's lunch cards through one mylunchmoney account, including any children who attend another FCPS school. This service also allows you to view a seven-day history of your child's lunch purchases, establish meal control settings, and set a daily or weekly spending limit for your child. Visit www.mylunchmoney.com to sign up.  If you prefer to use the old fashioned method and send a check payable to "Chesterbrook Food Services" to the school cafeteria, ask your child to give the check to his/her teacher in an envelope labeled "Lunch Money".  Be sure to include your child's name on the check!

In the event your child forgets his/her lunch and the lunch card account doesn't have any money, the PTA's Forgotten Lunch will temporarily fund your child's lunch.  Isabel Mancilla, the cafeteria manager, tracks the name and date that a child uses this account. New this year, if you are funding your child's account with a check, please make it out to "FCPS Food Service" to replenish your child's lunch account and Isabel will reimburse the Forgotten Lunch Fund in the amount your family owes the PTA.  Please note if you are using mylunchmoney and for some reason your child uses the PTA's Forgotten Lunch fund, you will need to reimburse the fund by writing a check to "Chesterbrook PTA" and sending it to school in an envelope marked "PTA's Forgotten Lunch Fund".

PTA Reflections Program

Chesterbrook PTA Auction Committee Needed

The team consists of Overall Chair who recruits and leads auction team members in the school's online auction fundraising event; coordinates promotion of the auction to the donors and the bidders; and is the main point of contact with our cMarket.com vendor.  Team members include Solicitations Co-Chair: (for people who love to get out of the house and "on a mission" Chesterbrook has an established list of previous auction donors, but always welcomes new business. This person will manage a small team of volunteers who will be assigned territories); Data Entry Co-Chair (for people who prefer to work from home. you only need a computer and internet access -- no special software is required); and Wrap-Up Co-Chair (for people who like to work from home AND get out of the house; position entails writing thank you letters to our donors and shipping items to winning bidders who do not live in the McLean area; shipping costs are paid by the winning bidder). Solicitation season starts in November. The online auction runs during the month before the Fun Fair. The PTA's online auction web service is cMarket.com.  CMarket.com has excellent client support to help you make the auction a great success!  Net profits account for approximately 25% of PTA fundraising program.   For more information on this position, please contact Kristin Cabral at vpfundraising@chesterbrook.org.

Hospitality Committee Members Needed

Do you like to bake and/or cook?  How about decorating for parties? The Hospitality Committee does these things and has the added bonus of  treating our Chesterbrook Staff  with goodies and honoring them.  An example of this was the dinner that the Hospitality Committee supplied for the staff on Back-to-School Night.  The dinner was catered by Panera Bread.  The staff all seemed to love it.  There was plenty of good food and treats and it seemed to make the long day a bit nicer for them.  One teacher told me that the dinner meant so much to her, because she didn't have to go out and get something to eat, or pack extra things for dinner. And another said that she doesn't get treated to dinner very often, so that dinner is extra special to her. It is rewarding serving the people who give so much to our children!

There are several other opportunities to be hospitable this year with the Hospitality Committee: 

· Nov 11     Thanksgiving Lunch  - decorating the cafeteria

· Dec 15     Holiday Treats for the Staff

· May 3      Staff Appreciation Lunch

· May 8      PTA Executive Board Breakfast

· June 15    Outgoing Staff Reception.   

So if baking or cooking is something you enjoy, and you would like to be on a fun committee, please send  me an email at kimjohnson5@gmail.com.  I would also love to work with a committee co-chair who would be willing to be at all events to lend a hand. Please contact me if you want more information and to join in on the fun!

Thanks Panera Bread for helping us provide a delicious meal to

 Now Enrolling for Fall Art Classes with Sue Bikoff