St Joseph’s PTA Newsletter – October 2021
Hello everyone and welcome back to a new year at St Joseph’s! A special welcome to parents and carers who are new to the school, we hope your children are settling in well.
We thought it might be helpful for new and returning parents and carers if we let you know a little bit about the PTA at St Joseph’s and what we do.
We would also like to tap into the many talents out there and seek new members to help deliver the wide range of activities and events we organise each year. You can be involved in all of our activities, or volunteer to help with one off activities, just let us know what you would prefer.
We are a group of parents and teachers who work together to organise a programme of events throughout the school year. These events provide social activities for children and parents, building community spirit both within and outside the school, and of course raise much needed funds for St Joseph’s. These events can take the form of school discos, quizzes, raffles, communion and confirmation teas, marathon relays and of course the annual community fun day event held each June.
Whilst these events are fun to take part in, the money raised really goes a long way to support the school. Despite the pandemic, and the many challenges faced by us all last year, we met our 2020/21 target to raise £7,500 thanks to your generous support. This funding is invaluable to the school and has helped purchase a range of learning products that have ensured our children are getting access to the best education either in the classroom or learning remotely from home. The provision of online resources also means that should your child have to self isolate in the coming year they can still easily access work and keep up with the rest of their class. Funding has also been used to invest in playtime equipment, games and play resources to ensure our children have the best experiences at school.
Hopefully with the roll out of vaccines we are starting to move out of pandemic mode and back to something that resembles our pre-COVID lives. We would love to get back to organising physical events where we can all get together soon, however we will continue to be mindful of social distancing guidance and take advice on each activity we plan.
Our PTA activities got off to a great start this year with our school uniform recycling event held in August. The event was very popular with many happy parents able to recycle a lot of practically new clothes. PE uniforms were in high demand! The event raised over £500 and leftover uniforms were donated to East Side Partnership and Care4Calais. Many thanks for all of your uniform donations, it was great to see that they had more value to give.
Just last weekend two relay teams comprised of St Joe’s staff and parents participated in the Belfast Marathon. Not to be outdone, pupils also walked 14 Marathons. Collectively an amazing £4,920 was raised for school funds which is just fantastic! Surely a fundraising record for the school! Many thanks to all of our athletes young and old for your efforts, hopefully the aches and pains will subside soon!
Looking forward, plans for the rest of the term include Ballyhuntamore which will make a welcome return during mid term break and the long overdue Cash for Clobber returns in November. You can leave your bags of unwanted clothes in the sheltered area of the playground at the school from Monday 1 November up to Thursday 4 November for collection. Please note no bags will be collected after the Thursday.
The very popular Big Christmas Raffle will follow in December with hopefully lots of prizes that support our local businesses. Previous prizes have included hotel stays, restaurant vouchers, hair and beauty vouchers, theatre tickets and hampers so it will be well worth buying a few tickets.
Plans for 2022 include a similar event to Jog January to get us all moving again after Christmas and early spring may also see a further sequel to St Joe’s Got Talent so it’s time to get rehearsing and practising!
Fingers crossed we will be even closer to normality in 2022 for a potential return of communion and confirmation teas, discos and the community fun day.
For this 2021/22 academic year we would like to set a fundraising target of £10,000 and it would be great if you could support us. If you would like to make a donation now you can do so here:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=WQZ2ZBMEUS796&source=url
This link will remain open throughout the year should you wish to donate at a later time or you may wish to set up your own small monthly donation to the school. Whilst we will be encouraging donations throughout the year please only do so if you can afford it. We will keep you updated as we progress towards our goal!
As highlighted earlier, we need some fresh talent to continue to deliver our full range of activities and events that make our school a community. If you would like to join the PTA you can contact us at stjospta@gmail.com.
If you can’t commit the time to join you can still drop into our meetings throughout the year. These will be taking place via Zoom for the foreseeable future so if you have a great fundraising idea please dial in!
All PTA meetings (with Zoom dial in details) and events will be publicised throughout the year via Class Connectors, the PTA section on the St Joseph’s PS website/app or via Facebook. So please keep in touch or get involved.
Many thanks for all of your support, take care of yourselves and hopefully see you soon,
The PTA
Mrs Duffy and Ms McKinney get ready for their leg of the Belfast Marathon.
