Welcome! 

We are honored to be part of the East Ridge Middle School PTA and are excited about the 25-26 school year and look forward to meeting you. We are excited to be a part of this incredible East Ridge Middle School community and hope to encourage folks to get involved in supporting our students, teachers, and the wonderful families at ERMS. 

Given our position as Co-Presidents of the PTA, we thought it might be fun to tell you a little bit about each other from the other person’s perspective. So, here goes…

Arizona-raised Dawn-Marie Callahan has been a powerful voice and advocate for our district’s students for years. Following her initial toe-dip as a room parent and regular volunteer, Dawn has been involved in the Ridgefield PTA community on the Board side for five years now, all in the Advocacy position at both Farmingville and then again at ERMS, a role which allowed her to get to know the inner workings of our district via the Board of Ed meetings—a place where she happily admits she still spends a too-significant amount of her limited free time. Dawn is a longtime graphic designer, though more recently she spends more of her professional time copyediting for physics journals (I know, right?!). This basically translates to a handy ability to both create a vision and be detail-oriented in its execution, which makes for a super useful partner in our dual role. On the personal side, Dawn is married to her college sweetheart; they moved here from Austin, Tx, in 2010 and are the proud parents of two active boys, one in seventh grade at ERMS, the other in fourth grade at Farmingville. In any glorious downtime which Dawn can scrape together beyond the PTA life/work balance and the various jaunts to the myriad venues which their boys have enjoyed being ferried to and fro, she is likely too wiped out to be anywhere other than at home, happily petting their two white German Shepherd rescues, or (even happier) fast asleep.

Long-Island-born Renee Farmer possesses a real go-getter spirit that is turning out to be a total dream to work alongside. She always has a plan for how to move forward and nothing seems to intimidate her—and trust me, we’ve tested her! Renee comes to us with a long history in fundraising and finance, which makes her our resident whiz with numbers. Despite having a busy full-time job that involves raising funds and planning events for a school that is not ours, this woman always finds a way to prioritize her most important job as “Mom”. The clear center of Renee’s universe are her four children: two high-school aged, a sixth-grade son at ERMS, and a fourth-grade daughter at Branchville. While new to the Ridgefield PTA scene, Renee ran a similar PTA concept at her children’s Montessori school in Georgia for three years, she has been an active volunteer at multiple schools since moving to our district in 2022, and she has even served as a fearless room parent. Basically: this is not her first rodeo, folks, and we’re definitely lucky to have her on our team. Renee is happiest being out and about in our lovely little town, traveling (whether be it by whim or plan), and playing with her kids and their two adorable pups. 

We both love living in Ridgefield with our families and doing our part to make all of our children’s time in middle school more memorable, while helping to bring our community closer through our work in the PTA. It’s a wild ride, but somebody’s got to do it, and we’re honestly quite pleased that this privilege has been given to us. 

Please never hesitate to reach out and share your thoughts, as we always look forward to making connections and strengthening the good work we do together.

With gratitude and excitement…

Renee and Dawn-Marie

ERMS PTA Co-Presidents