by Garrison Frost

Several years ago, I was sitting in the audience at a forum featuring candidates for the Redondo Beach School Board. The format for the event allowed people in the audience to ask questions of the candidates and I spent the bulk of the time yawning as folks tossed out one softball after another such as "Do you think more should be done to improve test scores?" and "Are you against crime on campus?"

However, I became more alert when someone in the audience asked "If elected, what will you do to support the business community?" To my mind, the correct answer to the question was simple: nothing. However, each of the candidates, including the ones who were eventually elected, gave long answers about how they would work with the business community to create mutually beneficial relationships, listen to its concerns, etc.

Let me explain why I felt that the correct answer was nothing. For starters, a school board member's first and final duty is to the students and families in the district. The business community is not his or her constituency. Obviously, the business community can do a great deal to support the students through sponsorships and the like, but it is a school board member's responsibility to understand that the relationship should always be one-way. Businesses can help the kids, but the kids should never directly help the businesses. The positive publicity that businesses receive from making donations should be enough incentive. Contributions to schools allow businesses with, let us say, sketchy reputations to put a better face on their activities. While we're never thrilled to see an industrial polluter or a bunch of cheesy Realtors their donations to the schools to put a better face on what they do, that only works if people are stupid enough to fail to see what's going on. Besides, there's no real downside for the kids. They get the money without any strings.

But sometimes there are strings, and that's when school boards have failed their true constituents. A few years after the events described above, I learned of a program in Manhattan Beach wherein a major contributor to the Education Foundation was being allowed to market directly to kids on campus. Claiming it was a sort of extra-curricular class, the district was allowing Hawthorne Savings to come onto campus, help kids open savings accounts and do personal banking. In a newspaper story in The Beach Reporter, a representative of the bank admitted that one of the reasons it was doing the program was the prospect of creating consumer loyalties at an early age. School district officials said that they were only too happy to do the program with Hawthorne Savings because of its long-standing contributions to the schools. The community should have been furious at this implied quid pro quo, but there was hardly a peep. There was even less objection to a similar program which allowed an investment broker to come onto campus and help kids "learn" to invest in stocks by opening accounts and making trades.

I must say that I don't know if these programs still exist in Manhattan Beach or any other local schools. I would hope that they do not.

In recent years, there has been a movement to reduce this sort of district-sanctioned youth marketing. Just recently, Los Angeles Unified joined a growing number of districts banning the sale of junk food and soft drink vending machines on campus, even though a portion of the sales went to toward school programs. This was because of a long overdue understanding that the only people benefiting from the sales were the vendors themselves. Although kids were getting some of the proceeds, it was wrong to encourage kids to eat and drink such crap.

It has been easy for districts to shun such smarmy deals with the devil during the last few years of flush budgets. However, now the tables have turned and California school districts have been warned of huge cuts in state funding, perhaps as high as $5 billion.

Local school districts are already looking for creative ways to raise funds. Most of the ideas we've heard — parcel taxes and scrip drives — would seem to keep an appropriate shield around the students.

However, desperate districts will do desperate things and a small compromise one day can turn into something downright ugly the next. Trust me, the devil will come calling at the door of these cash-strapped districts with all sorts of pleasant sounding arrangements that in reality only take advantage of the children they pretend to help. Let's just hope that our elected officials remember that selling the kids is no way to provide for their education.

(Jan. 26, 2003)

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