The new council is almost complete, please welcome the new members: chair - Craig Nakamoto, vice-chair - Sonja Latifpour, treasurer - Nicole White, secretary - Kristi Squires, past-president - Elise Zarkadas, OCASC - Joel Berger, Book Fair Chair - Seanna Kreager , member at large - Ryan Kilger, member at large - Ram Swery, member at large - Caroline Matt, member at large - Abby DeWolfe, member at large - Carol Geller, volunteer coordinator - TBD

Nomination forms for the 2012-2013 School Council executive elections are available here.  Nominations are due at the school office by August 28th.  The elections will be held at the first meeting of the new school year, on September 11, 2012.

Minutes for all School Council meetings in the 2010-11 up to the present have now been posted.  Please click here to read them.  Remember that minutes marked as DRAFT have not been approved yet, and may contain errors.

The missing Appendices have been added to the text of the school council constitution.  It has been determined that they were, in fact, not missing, merely rendered invisible by the efforts of your webmaster.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

I will clean up the formatting for web display and add hyperlinks to make the constitution more readable in the next few days. 

-Joel Berger,  web"master" 

Assuming that we wish to maintain or expand the communications tools we have now, we need a group of people who, collectively, have the mix of technical, writing, design, and organizational skills noted in the table below. In particular, I have highlighted the skills that I DON'T have. If the newsletter and website are to be useful, they must be published/ maintained consistently, every month, so that people in the RPPS community can rely on them – nobody will check a website that is not up-to-date, nobody will submit content for a newsletter that never comes out. That is a level of reliability that I cannot provide alone.

At minimum, I would suggest that someone be tasked as “Newsletter Editor” or “Communications Director”, with responsibility for collecting news items and ensuring that the newsletter is laid out and the website is updated. The key skills needed are organization, drive, and writing ability. Some ability with layout and design would be good, but not essential, and a willingness to learn a little HTML (it's just WordStar, for you oldsters) and layout would be great.

The Webmaster is responsible for coding and high-level layout of website and email, as needed, and any other technical concerns. Moderate HTML and layout skills, and some writing ability are needed. I am able and willing to continue as Webmaster.

Ideally, a third person (“Website Editor” or some such) would help out, fill in gaps, etc. A twenty-minute phone call, email chat, or meeting once a month would probably suffice to keep the monkeys on their chairs.

- Joel A. Berger

Task	Frequency & Complexity	Technical (HTML)	Writing/ editing	Layout/ design	Organizing
Deal with Netfirms/ CIRA	once per year, trivial: know passwords, pay bill	Moderate	Nil	Nil	Minor
Deal with Google/ Mailchimp	ongoing, but usually trivial: know passwords	Moderate	Nil	Minor	Minor
Answer Email	ongoing, usually trivial	Nil	Minor+	Minor	Minor
Newsletter – Collect news	monthly	Nil	Minor	Nil	Moderate+
- Write up/format	monthly	Nil	Moderate	Minor	Moderate+
- Layout	monthly	Minor	Minor	Moderate	Minor
- Design layouts	occasionally	Moderate	Minor	Moderate+	Nil
Website - Maintain	ongoing, usually minor	Moderate	Minor	Moderate	Moderate
- Home page	monthly/ yearly?	Minor	Moderate	Moderate	Moderate/ Minor
- Newsfeed	weekly?	Minor/Nil	Moderate	Minor+	Moderate+
- Calendar	monthly?	Minor/Nil	Minor	Minor	Moderate
- Update content	twice per year?	Moderate	Moderate	Moderate	Moderate
- New content	occasionally	Moderate+	Moderate	Moderate+	Nil

This year is the 50th anniversary of the RPPS Book Fair.  Be on the look out for volunteer forms from Book Fair.  The dates for this year's Book fair will be Nov. 4, 5, and 6th.

We have a new afterschool program for students in grade 1 and 2, and the Homework Club for grades 3-6 has been expanded.  The programs are run by the Bettye Hyde Co-operative Nursery School.

Thanks to our generous donors, RPPS will have a new play structure constructed this fall.  There have been some delays, but we hope to see the structure finished before spring.