So bento-ing and my attempts to be involved at the school may have gotten me into trouble! Each year, the schools foundation holds an auction to raise money to help keep positions in the school that the state isn’t able to maintain anymore. Although a public school, the neighborhood is fairly affluent (we’re kind of the oddball family here; we couldn’t normally afford where we live, long story), and has very involved parents. Apparently they raise a fair bit of money. Even after the cut that is required to go to the state to help less-well community supported schools, the auction money pays for the PE teacher (can you beleive that many portland public schools just have NO PE at all? I was shocked!) and for the music teacher and part of another normal staffing position, as well as some other stuff. They do so well that the school has been able to eliminate all the cheesy wrapping paper and greeting card type sales.
Anyway, one of the things they sell at auction are classroom art projects. These aren’t your garden variety projects Kindergarten fingerprints turned into bugs on a terra cotta pot.  For instance, last year a kindergarten class covered a donated birdbath with ceramic tiles, that they had mosaic’d in patterns in smaller broken tiles. Apparently it sold very well. The various classroom projects go for several hundred to several thousand dollars. So on my volunteer interest form, I guess I indicated that I was willing to help with my son’s classroom art project. And I am. But the teacher seems to think – based ENTIRELY on my “creative and artistic lunches” – that I’m some amazing artist person who has a strong idea of what the classroom project should be and am taking the lead on it, and I don’t know what else. I had two different parents come up to me at the back to school event on Thursday, opening with something about me being artistic and running the classroom art project.
Yikes. I’m not that person. I’d like to think I’m creative, but I am a bit of a dabbler. I do a little of this and a little of that. I don’t have a strong talent for any particular genre, so I don’t give over a big time committment to any of them. Besides, I rather like being a dabbler. So, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed.
PLUS! I’ve committed to sharing the responsibility of “head parent” in my son’s class, involvement in the PTA, expressed interest in the green team, and it looks like I may end up volunteering for the parent driven art literacy program, as we currently have no parent in kidlet’s class signed up, and without a parent, that class just doesn’t get the material.
Ay yi yi
This would have been a handful without a baby on the hip. I have a feeling its going to be a busy year 😉
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