Newsletter, 23 January 2012
Find us at lascrucesacademy.org
Dear friends of the Academy,
Growth of the Academy – students, teachers, and programs
There’s much to report since our previous newsletter written at the end of November. Our students have been very busy in and out of school. Groups 2 and 3 have been raising money for Somalia, and all of our students have been collecting food to give to Casa de Peregrinos in town. The older students in Groups 2 and 3 visited the Branigan Cultural Center to learn more about New Mexico history on our Centennial anniversary. Our 2nd-graders performed a play, Imaginator Man, written by one of them. Group 1 (kindergarten and 1st grade) studied the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. All our kindergarteners are already reading. We welcomed a new 1st-grader this semester, and more parents and potential students visited us this month to look into registration for next academic year.
We’ll host an open house at the school for potential students and their parents on Tuesday, February 7th. We’ll have two sessions, from 8:00 to 10:00 AM and from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. Please spread the word to friends who have children who might benefit from the Academy and similarly benefit the Academy as our current students do.
We have lots of news about teachers, too. We all, students and teachers and board members, said a reluctant farewell to Erica, who worked with us all fall as a student teacher. At the same time, we now have two new initiatives in teaching. Shahla McDowell, grandmother of one of the kindergarteners, has begun teaching the Farsi language of Persia to several students at the end of the school day. We also have music instruction for all for 2 hours weekly, offered by Della Bustamante. Karen Caldwell, mother of a 5th-grader, gave guest programs on planetary science last semester and now is giving art history lessons once a week. Parents Polly Kamali, Gaylene Fasenko, Travis Turner, Natascha Preiss, and Kelly Price, have come in frequently to help with silent reading. Parent Leticia Burbano de Lara helps frequently with Spanish. Board chair Vince Gutschick developed a science demo on high-speed photography (triggered-flash) of a bursting balloon. He and 3 students, one from the Academy and 2 from Sierra Middle School, tested it on a Sunday and then Vince presented it to all the Academy students on Friday, January 20th. A writeup will be on the Web soon.
Ensuring our wise growth – getting the word out to the public and to potential benefactors
Our board has been active and is poised to grow with members and advisors. The pressing activity of fundraising in our capital campaign (see below) is engaging our board. Board chair Vince Gutschick gave a warmly received presentation about the Academy to the High-Tech Consortium on January 20th. Another presentation is set for Thursday, February 2nd at 2 PM in the conference room of Good Samaritan Village. The event is open to the public; please come, and invite any friends who have an interest. There are more details on our website, readily reachable from the home page at LasCrucesAcademy.org. We’re also working up plans for a panel presentation on education at a summer meeting of the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance, and the Rotary Club plans to invite us for yet another talk. The energetic Abbas Ghassemi is close to joining us on the board, lending his wealth of effective contacts. Nathan Small has offered to help the board meet people with great links to community members who can help us raise funds.
We’ve been in the public eye in other ways, too. As we noted in the November newsletter, Carlos Correa from KRWG-TV visited the Academy in late November and filmed a wonderful 2-˝ minute segment that aired shortly afterward. You can see the segment on YouTube; the link is reachable by clicking here. We also had an unexpected, detailed, and exuberant article about us created by the writers at wiz duh m. In their own description, “[wiz duh m]‘s new P.U.S.H. campaign is all about broadcasting non-profit and charity groups who are for bettering our world and who have a particular cause they support.” The link can be followed here. We’ve also not been shy about promoting ourselves; students, parents, teachers, and board members now sport 42 polo shirts embroidered with our logo, URL, and telephone number.
More about money – donations, current and future, and our major capital campaign
We continue to get support from students and their parents. Several students have donated some of their savings and earnings. A student and a parent, Janine Sotelo, donated goods in kind that are much appreciated. Parents Marc and Iris Chavez, Donald and Svetlana West, Jean-Pierre Reinhold and Natascha Preiss, board member Paul Deason, and friend of the Academy Donovan Reed have together enriched our building fund by $1275. Our scholarship fund grew by $900, thanks to parents Jean-Pierre Reinhold and Natascha Preiss and teacher Paula Hines. In December and January, we applied a total of $3,257.50 from the scholarship fund to support two current students and one recent student. We’ll need more scholarship funds by April.
We have one more way for donors to find us online. We’re now listed with nonprofitlist.org; a donation link appears on our Website’s home page, and it leads to a donation button, which you can also reach by clicking here. Please remember other ways that anyone can support us: the Albertsons’s community program (all one needs is a little scannable tag, which we can supply and which is presented at checkout); direct links on our Website to Google Checkout, PayPal, or Intuit Payment Network (visit the link Giving at right in the navigation bar, or click here); via shopping with a variety of merchants after signing up with the eScrip program that rebates a portion of the price of goods or meals to us, or by shopping online with Amazon.com with a code or in person at Target with a REDcard (please see the link at right on the navigation bar, Giving, and then Partnerships, or click here).
We’re working to get a very ambitious infusion of funds to purchase a property on which we can build our future campus. This is our capital campaign for $1 million. Two drivers of the need for a campus are the limit on the number of students (less than 40, practically, even if fire code allows 49) that we can fit in our current rental quarters , and the changes in the Mall (construction of a road that will cut off much of our outdoor play area). We’re going about this earnestly and professionally, as we’ve noted in earlier newsletters. We can add significantly to the items already reported earlier and also in this newsletter, above. First, we realized that a paid and professional-level development officer would serve us well in making the estimated 2,000 personal contacts we’ll need to do; our volunteer board can only do so much. We’re using our network of contacts to recruit this development officer. We can also profit from the services of volunteers, once they have been given training in professional standards of fundraising by board chair Vince Gutschick. Some of our Academy parents, Polly Kamali, Parry Murray, Svetlana West, and Alfredo Gurmendi have contributed already. We are also interested if any of you, our readers and friends, can help. Finally, we have posted the volunteer opportunity on United Way’s Center for Nonprofit Excellence, which you can reach by clicking here.
We’re looking for expert advice from other fundraisers, too. Vince visited the Manzano Day School and Sandia Prep in November, as we reported in the previous newsletter. We’re also conferring directly with foundations. Vince will visit the McCune Foundation and Frost Foundation in Santa Fe in February.
To help apprise everyone of our goals, needs, competence, and financial management that must be visible to potential major donors, we are preparing to post a wide range of documents on our Website. They’ll be available via the Capital Campaign link on the navigation bar at the right side of each page.
Sincerely,
Lou Ellen Kay, Director
Vince Gutschick, Chair of the Board of Trustees