Our wonderful PFLASA Study Groups tutors are available to provide support for preparation during finals week for students who feel they may benefit from it.
Help us earn the Texas PTA Golden Apple Membership Award by donating a faculty membership. This award is earned by recruiting 100% school faculty as members. Texas PTA’s definition of faculty is principals, assistant principals, teachers, counselors, and instructional assistants employed at the campus full-time.
Currently, we have about 45 memberships for faculty and we need several more. You can donate memberships on the PTSA website. Select faculty membership and put donation in the the name and email address.
We have to submit all of the memberships and an application for this award by December 15th so please donate today!
It’s time for one of the teachers’ favorite events! Every year before Thanksgiving, PFLASA collects pies and thank you notes to give to teachers and staff (including the afternoon bus drivers, the janitorial staff and admin). Everyone gets a pie! But to pull this off we need a lot of pies and volunteers. If you can, please donate pies or sign up to help.
LASA Dance invites you to the Teacher Talent Show on December 6th from 5pm to 6pm. Doors will open at 4:15pm for preshow entertainment, which includes balloon twisting lessons. Admission includes a free cookie! This event will be fun and relaxing and will raise money for the LASA Dance teams. We hope you will join us!
Tickets are available online, at the door, or through the QR code. We appreciate advance ticket sales so we can plan refreshments.
We would like to recognize and congratulate the amazing artists who participated and excelled in this year’s Reflections Art Program. The theme this year was Accepting imperfection and we had a decent response from LASA and hope to grow this program even larger next fall!!! Here are the LASA artists for this year who will be receiving awards at their upcoming recognition luncheon. Thank you for being a part of this wonderful part of LASA and ACPTA programs. Our fantastic artists are:
Vinson Ratcliffgardy
Janani Easwar
Sierra Kumar
Amelia Ratcliffgardy
Grant Ratcliffgardy
Vivian Prather
Sanvi Paranjape
Gargi Pandey
Tiernan O’Keefe
Thank you for all of your hard work, and we’ll see you at the recognition luncheon!
Reflections Committee for LASA
Congrats to the LASA PTSA for earning the Texas PTA Snappy Increase Membership Award! This award is earned by achieving more than 100% of the previous year’s total membership by October 31st. We appreciate everyone joining and couldn’t have earned it without each and every one of our members. If you haven’t joined yet, it’s not too late to join our Award Winning PTSA!
We would love to earn the Texas PTA December Golden Apple Membership Award and need your help! The Golden Apple Award is earned when schools recruit 100% of their faculty as members. Can you help by donating a faculty membership today? Please use the LASA PTSA website, enter “Donation” in the name fields and enter donation@donation.org in the email field. We will give your donated memberships to one of our wonderful faculty members.
Our first topic was the Project Graduation Auction which by now has ended. Perhaps you were among the lucky bidders? It was a great effort by the Class of 2025 and a preview of the work ahead for the other classes. We also covered our Giving Thanks Pie event and signups, which gets its own post here in the Raptor. Please read and donate, and if you can’t donate a pie, kindly write a note of appreciation. Those notes mean a lot to teachers.
Our Great Gatherings Fundraiser announced two events coming up soon. An All-Class Fiesta on December 12th and Class of 2025 Craft Beer Showcase on January 11th. Thanks to the hosts and the attendees for supporting our seniors. We also had an update from Grants, the Raising Healthy Raptors chair, and PTSA. I have plans for a post from Grants as an end-of-semester summary of all the things we’ve been able to do with your donated dollars!
After we adjourned, we had an update from Principal Crescenzi. These are always interesting, but this one talked about AP Research and their first semester project into the history of Johnston High School. For those of you who don’t know, our building opened as Johnston High School before becoming Eastside Memorial and now LASA. As part of this discussion, Ms. Crescenzi shared that for years, she’s been asked about the “Disco Ram” (the Ram was the Johnston mascot), but she had no idea what they were talking about. In an exciting development, the team found a picture of the “Disco Ram,” and perhaps someday this image can be incorporated into LASA. For those of you interested, the research is being posted (and updated) on the LASA site.
Our next and only December meeting is December 6th. As we wrap down the semester, I’m planning to have a light agenda and then open the meeting up for socializing and questions. Freshmen parents–come ask about finals! As always, everyone at LASA is a member of PFLASA and is welcome to attend.
Wishing you a restful Fall Break and Happy Thanksgiving
-Ellen Stewart-Klein, PFLASA President
We thank you and appreciate your contributions towards providing a safe and sober Project Graduation celebration for these soon-to-be graduates! We are about 2/3 of the way to our goal, and we can’t thank you enough! We do have a few items that didn’t sell, so we will extend the auction for those items through Sunday, November 24, ending at 8pm. We always welcome donations towards our efforts. You can hit THE EASY BUTTON to make a contribution.
Click HERE to bid in the extended auction.
You or your student can pick up winning items* between 7:30-8:30 am Thursday and Friday outside the doors to the school office between the office and counselor’s offices. Thanks again!
* not responsible for lost or damaged items. No alcohol is allowed on campus, so we will make special arrangements for those items.
At a recent PFLASA meeting, there was a discussion about academic dishonesty. One of the many factors brought up was the discrepancy between the relatively high percentage of students who have observed academic dishonesty and the relatively low percentage of students who go on to report the acts they observed, even though students know that cheating is “wrong.”
Here is an interesting, open-access study in the June 2024 edition of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology entitled “Don’t be a rat: An investigation of the taboo against reporting other students for cheating.” Take a deep dive or a more superficial read of the introduction and discussion sections to get further insight into some of the nuanced reasons for the lack of reporting. It might then be interesting to ask your child for their experiences, dilemmas, and personal thoughts on this issue, which hopefully will give you some ideas about how to best support them.
Party alert! Come join your fellow LASA parents for a fun Fiesta with games, tacos, and drinks on Dec 7th hosted by Mai Doan, Jolie Sanchez, Lilliana Remus, Elva Mendoza and Stephanie Clayton at the Doan home in SW Austin. Tickets are $30/person and all money will go towards Project Graduation 2025. Parents of all grade levels are welcome!
https://pflasa.org/store/fiesta