Welcome Back!

We are honored and privileged to be nominated as your new co-chairs. Please allow us to introduce ourselves as your new Parent Association Co Chairs, Kimberly Cacioppo (kimberlycacioppo@yahoo.com) and Pooja Tripathi (pooja@tri-path.com). We thank everyone who has worked so hard for the school, including our dedicated and wonderful Executive Board, and particularly our last year's co-chairs, Valerie Pearce and Anna Torres who have led with great care, energy, sense of community and fairness. The PA’s fantastic work for the entire school has been an inspiration to us. It is due to their tremendous donation of time, talents and funds that we have had such a successful year.

Parents are critical to our intellectually and culturally rich school. You help run and fund so many essential services that we can’t list them all here. Your generosity allows our children to excel, bringing many honors to FIDS. You purchase extra books and fund extra activities which provide for better academics. Your generous contributions of time and expertise assist the educators and administrators in addressing the major issues of the school, whether they involve safety, health, education or our childrens future. Your hospitable receptions to welcome students and parents or to honor our faculty build the warmth of FIDS as our second home.

We will continue to improve the infrastructure of the PA, coordinate better teams and committees, increase communication, accountability and efficiency and grow the participation of our parent volunteers. We will explore new programs for fund-raising and community building with your guidance. We will proactively research the needs of our students as opposed to merely responding, and we will continue to monitor how our funds are spent.

To achieve this, we must make the committees even more productive with greater involvement from the parent body. The two of us will look to fill these committees, including appointing chairs to them, in the next, month. Please contact us if you are interested. We will continue to reach out to you, as part of the creative energy bank of our great school, to find better ways to serve our children, and, from that, to serve our entire community.

Join us in our many activities, including serving as committee chairs or members, as volunteers, or just as attendees. Please contact us if you have an interest, a concern, or a contribution in time, funds, or thought. Thank you for all your contributions. We look forward to working with you this coming year.

This year PA meetings will be in the morning, beginning at 9:00 am. Then to be followed by "Effective Parenting Series". This will include a speaker on various topics. For the first PA meeting please plan to be at the Tennis Center in Fisher Island on September 8, 2010.

Thank You For All You Have Done !

Many PA members have  generously given their time and energy during the  summer as FIDS parents. While there is not enough space to list everyone, we would like to thank the following:

Kimberly Blake, Valerie Pearce, Fabiola Carvallo-Rogondino, Jana Neff and Brian Neff.