my advice to everyone is get married when you're 30 so you know what you're doing

I bought the house I grew up in on Lake Minnetonka and yes I got the family discount so I can't afford it I have no kids but I borrow kids all the time I think that's part of my connection to the students here is because I don't have any kids I borrow my sister's kids what I like about that is I can give them back at the end of the day so that's what I've been up to

as I mentioned I bought the house I grew up in I still have the same phone number from when I was a kid that's amazing

so I have really deep roots here and I got started just looking for something else you know get involved in and so the association had just started and Steve Frazier was my Civics teacher at West Junior High so he gave me a call and asked me if I wanted to be on it so I've been on it since the very beginning

our vision has always been to connect alumni but we do so many different events so the first event we did was the all-school reunion in 2002 and there was no Facebook and people people were hungry for connections so it was really well attended I will tell you we ran out of food because we hadn't planned as well as we could have now we do it every four years and we've got it pretty much nailed and again our original Mission was to connect alumni we do fundraisers to help fund for the teacher grants and you know teachers always spend a lot of money out of their own Pockets so this was really cool they can apply for grants for projects that they want to do and then we fund them along with the foundation

we also have our annual awards show and we people nominate alumni that have done incredible things and then no kidding they fly from all over the United States to come back to the high school to have get their award and last year I put Kleenex on the tables because they're they give really touching speeches about what Minnetonka means to them

we have like distinguished alumni so some of the people that have done that have been CEOs of large corporations and they went to Minnetonka High School we have someone from my class of 1970 he has 25 medical patents working with medtronics and saving lives we have young alumni so some of the younger kids have just done incredible things even in just less than 10 years so and then we also like to honor our sports team

anyone can attend the events and it's free it's a free breakfast and it's really fun to watch everyone connect you see people running towards each other going oh my God I can't believe you're here

we've asked people to register so we know how much food to have sure because you would never want to run out of food we ran out of coffee last year so we want to make sure we know but it's a free event and it we probably don't put it up on the website for a while but and you can always vote for we will have you vote for the teacher award that we give out also

if we can all volunteer or do stuff with the school there's lots of opportunities outside of alumni too that you can do then I just think we make the school better

after I graduated the University of Minnesota I was able to teach in New Zealand and Australia for a few years and then I moved to California to teach and go to graduate school

I became involved last year when I met marietti when she retired a friend of mine had passed away and so you know old childhood friends I've been attacking people got together and we're connected and then I met Marietta and found out she had time on her hands so we combined and I was excited about some of these things we combined we were talking the children call it hoco which is homecoming right right but that's when we do our alumni awards and then same thing it's been a couple years we've delayed this is all the crazy health concerns but now we have our all-class all Friends reunion coming up so that's been fun to connect with alumni of all ages

big thing like what Marietta said they're open events so we really try to have free open events like the all-class all Friends reunion there are some events when we'll go to a theater or a game where we might pay some money but for the most part we like to be welcomed and invite people because it's just one of those things some people can come for 15 minutes sometimes you meet new people other people like Marietta or we see her everywhere so but that's a big part like she said check out the website because people can either register for events they'll be informed we also need volunteers too so what I noticed is there's a few people doing a lot of work again anybody that anybody that's alumni or friend of Minnetonka schools can kind of help out right and it isn't just fundraising it is I mean these fundraising is a little bit and you mentioned giving back to teachers but it's Network it's reconnecting colleagues

well we do mostly planning but we do watch our budget and I don't know just regular kind of board meetings where you talk about the exciting policies and procedures and those kinds of things but really our vision is we started out with connecting alumni so that's really our overarching goal that we have is to help people connect so we have a class rep for every year and so those are the ones that we work with to get volunteers and help them because they in turn have their lists and so then they send out information

so you know most schools if it's colleges or high schools have reunions so the class of 2000 gets together and celebrates this isn't all class so Minnetonka started that's almost 75 years old but the high school and there was deep Haven in Excelsior before this so there's still some deep Haven in Excelsior grads but everybody all classes are invited we closed down Excelsior so there'll be a Reunion Band tables restaurants host events but it's really a way to celebrate you know our success with Minnetonka schools whatever age sure and so the friends part might be if you're the parents of a graduate and you didn't go you could go or if you live in the community and you've known a lot of people you're welcome absolutely and as we mentioned teachers or coaches or all of these people who have supported children now whatever they're doing maybe they're a retired coach please come and my mother people's family that are part of the schools that's exactly why it's an open event to kind of celebrate that

it takes a community to raise a child well this is what the Alumni Association is there's a lot of us in the community that don't necessarily come to school daily but this is a way for people to kind of reconnect with school old friends kind of learn what's happening because there's a lot of exciting things happening at schools

well you know one of the things that I I want people to hear from this message is you know some parts of school haven't changed we still do a homecoming it's a big event as we had last week that was pet fests and games and a huge dance but there's also you know school has changed a lot over 50 years to meet the future needs of our students and it's exciting to get back to have our alumni come back and see this amazing school program that we're offering right now so we did have just put a plug in there for the future we had our our Vantage our experiential learning program kickoff we had 500 community members come back in to be mentors for those students so there's lots of opportunities for alumni to get engaged and connect I'm mentoring a student in public policy lots of fun things there so lots of opportunities to connect with alumni