2025 School Year

August 27, 2025

Hello Dragons! Welcome to the podcast version of the weekly Dragon Digest. It’s the last week of summer, 2025. My name is Steve Allwine and I’m the new PTA president for Seattle’s own Cascadia Elementary. I’m sure all of you are just as excited as my family is for the new school year to start back up. It’s been a heck of a summer, but I know my kids are ready to head back school.

My main goal of this podcast is to help keep parents and students engaged with what is coming up in the coming week at our school. I hope to keep these relatively brief – at around 3 to 7 minutes each so they can be easily added to your regular podcast subscription. I also plan on getting a few voices from inside the school to join me and help get the word out of what our kids are up to and how parents can get involved.

And speaking of getting involved, the school has reached out to the PTA to call on getting some volunteers into the school this week to help wrap text books for all of the classrooms. This will help ensure that these investments will last a long time and stay in good shape. Check out the emailed version of the dragon’s digest for the sign up sheet.

Volunteering brings me to another related topic, which is signing up at the Seattle Public Schools to volunteer inside of Cascadia and other schools within the district. Before any parent volunteer is allowed into any school in the district during the school week, we all first have to go through a brief training and background check. The background check can take a week or two, so it’s important to get this taken care of well before any major event you want to help out.

And speaking of events, other the first day of school, next Wednesday, September 3rd, both the PTA and school is hosting a *Meet your Teacher* event on the afternoon of *Tuesday, September 2nd*. Starting at 4pm, the PTA will be hosting a couple tables in the playground courtyard, giving out information, signing up volunteers, and selling the latest versions of Cascadia Elementary merchandise – which is a cool new black and red color T-shirt. And I believe some Cascadia Elementary branded pencils to boot. While all of this is going on, kids can run around and play on the playground. Then from 5pm to 6pm, families can enter the school to meet and greet their teachers and learn the locations of their new classrooms.

A few notes about this event: it’s aimed primarily for the kids themselves to ask questions – so us parents should plan on letting the kids take the lead. And from what I hear, they’re expecting at least 1,000 kids and parents to show up, so definitely get there early.

I also hear the PTA may have some treats for attendees as they’re leaving.

Well, that’s about it for this week. Thanks for listening in, and I urge you to subscribe to get those regular updates. Have a great week Dragons!