2012 Updates

It's been a while.  We are all stretched thin as we know a lot of you are!  The board has been meeting and trying to reenergize the council.  Unfortunately, there will not be a mini-conference this year.  We just have not been able to coordinate it this year.  We are working on a March meeting and a May meeting at this time so watch for more information on those. 

We need you!  Even our board is dwindling and we need some of you to get involved and bring you ideas!  If you're interested in joining our board, please email Susan Seckinger at Susan.seckinger@Beaufort.k12.sc.us.  We will be holding elections at our March meeting!  

Springtime Celebrations and A Ticket to the Fair

On Thursday, March 24th, Beaufort County Reading Council held it's final formal meeting of the 2010-2011 school year. It was A Ticket to the Fair complete with pizza, cotton candy and balloons. As the highlight of this meeting, the council recognized the school level winners of the SC State Superintendent Writing Awards. The district winners were also announced. The council started recognizing the school level winners in this way last school year. So often, the district winner gets all of the recognition and we wanted to celebrate each of the school winners as well.

As a part of the writing celebration, two local authors shared their stories of becoming published authors. Both MaryBeth Roulston and Mildred Glover are employees of the school district as well as published authors. Parents, students and council members delighted in hearing them tell of their stories and journeys.

After students and parents exited the celebration, council members discussed upcoming community events as well as council business. There are two vacant board positions for this coming school year. The council needs to fill a vice president and president elect position. If you are interested in one of these, please contact Cynthia Laizer at cynthia.laizer@beaufort.k12.sc.us.

Upcoming community events include a new partnership with the Beaufort County Library System. To kick off this partnership, BCRC will be co-hosting a booth at Kids Fest at the Cross Creek Shopping Center in Beaufort from 10-2 on April 2nd. We hope to see you there!

Our Ticket to the North Pole

A good time was had by all at our last meeting. Carol McMillan did a fabulous presentation on tips for grant writing. Jan Sparks shared many good holiday book titles. Tech tips were shared. All enjoyed hot cocoa and baked treats!

New T-shirt colors are just in!

A TICKET TO THE NORTH POLE!

Please join us at the DESC in Beaufort on Thursday, Deccember 9th at 4:15 for refreshements and good conversation. The meeting will begin at 4:30. We will have a guest speaker, Carol McMillan, who will share with us some interesting information about getting grants for our classrooms. We will also have a Holiday Book talk about some titles you may want to look into the season.

So, come join us for some hot cocoa and cookies and take a ride on our Polar Express! We hope to see you there!

Need directions or more information? Email Cynthia at cynthia.laizer@beaufort.k12.sc.us

Looking Ahead

BCRC has many great things planned this year. We shared many of them at our first meeting of the year on September 2nd at Pritchardville.

Meetings
We originally had another meeting scheduled for October 28th, but it has been postponed to December 9th. We try very hard not to conflict with other major meetings and it came to our attention that we were once again going to be conflicting with the mentor meeting. We'd like to involve all of our newest teachers in the council, so we made the decision to reschedule. At this meeting, we will have a special guest sharing many grant opportunities that are out there for teachers. With funding as tight as it is, this is the time to be creative in where we look.

Community Service
This year, we will be starting a new event we'd like to call Books and Blankets. It is in the planning stages and we need you to get involved. Our goal is to host one event on the Beaufort River and one on the May River. Please contact us if you'd like to be a part of these activities.

Literacy Mini-Conference
We received so much positive feedback from the first one, we are already working hard at getting our next mini-conference planned. We have confirmed that USCB will again be working with us this year and we thank them for hosting us. The conference will be held on the first Saturday in February from 8:00-3:00.

Membership
This year, we are working very hard to confirm a representative at each building including private and public schools. We are offering a wonderful incentive. The building rep whose school has the highest percentage of members, will win a complimentary registration to SCIRA's Literacy Conference, A Ticket to Adventure, on February 24-26th.

If that isn't exciting enough, we are also going to give another registration to the SCIRA conference to one lucky member. On November 1st, we will randomly choose one person who has either become a new member or renewed their membership. That member will also receive a complimentary registration.

So, plan to join, renew and get involved!

A TICKET TO THE MOVIES!

SCIRA's theme this year is fun: A Ticket to Adventure. We all know literacy is such a ticket. We're going to try to make our BCRC meetings all related to a ticket somewhere...this time to the movies. So let's pop some corn, grab a snack and get started!

We welcome you to a whole new school year! We'll be sharing so much with you this year . So, our first meeing will be held on Thursday, September 2nd at 4:15 at the new Pritchardville Elementary. We thought you'd appreciate getting a peek at the beautiful new school and Principal Charles Johnson was excited to have us! There will be tons of plans for the new year shared, great refreshments and doorprizes. Come and join us! We hope to see you there.

The End of the Year

The end of the school year is in sight and we're all under a lot of demands! Hang in there. :)

Thank you to everyone for all of your support this year. We've enjoyed all of our meetings and especially the Mini-conference.

We'd like to call for all books collected as a part of our community outreach this year. If you have any books to donate to our book drive, please send them to us. You can either forward them to a literacy coach if you're a part of a BCRC elementary or middle school or email me and I will arrange to get them from you. We'll be cutting off donations on May 1st so we can sort and assemble our gift to CAPA and hopefully some graduating seniors from USCB Beaufort.

In the next few weeks the BCRC officers will be attending a leadership workshop at the state level and the BCRC board will be meeting in the weeks that follow to develop a long range plan for next year. If you have any input, please email. It's your council....make it yours!

Thank you everyone!
Cynthia Laizer, BCRC President