School Fundraiser Manifesto

Dear School Board Representative,

I write this time to discuss the use of our children as captive sales agents for private companies. Our son's school today sent home notice of our third fund-raiser since the winter break. One was the coupon book drive, which I believe many schools in the area participated in. The second was the PTA Cake Auction, a popular, parent-led and family involved fund-raiser. The third was a request to provide the names and addresses of 7-10 friends and family members to a magazine marketer, with some of the profits from magazine sales being returned to the school for "school supplies and student and teacher incentives".

First, let me say that I love the cake auction and events like it. They involve the creativity of the students and their parents and teach the students very useful lessons about how markets and prices work. I wish we could do things like this more often without wearing out the idea, but it's a great success for our school.

That said, I'm quite disturbed by the deputation of our children to sell stuff for private companies. Whether wrapping paper, magazines or coupon books, there is a company on the other side of these transactions making money from putting our kids to work as their sales staff. Children are encouraged to participate so forcefully that when we chose to opt out of the coupon book sale and instead make an equivalent cash donation, our son felt left out. Today, he was so excited to write down the names and addresses of our relatives so that he could get a trinket. I'm frankly appalled that our teachers were essentially discouraged from showing the President's address to students unless some clear link could be made to the standards, but class time is taken up to get them to sell overpriced (maybe) stuff to their unsuspecting relatives for a private company's profit.

Is our school district budget really so constrained that our children need to hit up their fixed income grandparents for another magazine subscription? Don't teachers get supplies contributed by parents? We'd be far happier to provide supplies requested than sell out our siblings' contact information. The letter accompanying the magazine fund raiser suggested "staff incentives". I don't know about other teachers, but I get incentives. They're called a job and a salary. The salary goes up when I get good teacher evaluations and publish successfully and the job ends when I don't. If we can't compensate our teachers appropriately, then the school district needs to trim expenses in other areas (like retired administrators now serving as high-salary consultants in the school district office) or request a tax increase.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, when we use our children as the sales agents for private companies, we send several messages to our children. First, we provide them with an opportunity to learn sales skills. I know that this is an invaluable skill, but I resent having them learned under duress and at such a young age. But on the down side, we tell our children that it's ok to pay more than market value for something. This attitude that has led to record consumer debt. We tell our children that competition doesn't matter because people will pay more than market value for a cause. This is no different from asking our children to go hat in hand from door to door asking for contributions for our struggling schools. It tells our children that our community doesn't really value public education, since they, at ages 4 and up, have to do their part to raise the funding for it.

No, I'm not generally opposed to fund raisers. For specific purposes, extracurricular activities, sports, and even PTA/PTO support they are vital. I am vehemently opposed to conscription of our children to private profit-making companies for operating budget support. I am even more opposed to using classroom time to train the children to make poor economic decisions and guilt them into participating in a wrong-headed fundraiser.

You have been a good listener to my concerns in the past. Please help me know how to communicate these concerns to the board and the superintendent.

Best regards,

Bitter Man