Our librarian found a great company called Mrs. Nelson - go to
Mrs. Nelson's Toy and Book Shop
They provided registers and had great products. We won't be using Scholastic in the future.
Hi! My name is Tiffany Peterson, and I am a Educational Consultant with Usborne Books. I wanted to respond to some of the previous posts about Usborne Books. Usborne Books provides large book fairs for schools with over 900 students. The consultant is in charge of doing most of the work involved in the book fair. Usborne does not sell any type of toys or junk with our book fairs, and we do not sell "Pop Culture" books. The Usborne family of books is internationally acclaimed as the finest educational children's book line-up in the marketplace today. Usborne offers over 1,500 fiction and non-fiction titles that inspire, enthrall and teach your students through reading. Usborne Books offers three different incentive programs for your school:
Good for you! We used a different company for our book fair this year and they were wonderful! Scholastic continued to hound me nearly everyday to reconsider them. In our area they are very difficult to deal with and honestly can't take no for an answer. Even after I told them we were going with a different company they continued to call my school.They attempted to contact last years book fair chair to sway them. I finally had to come out and say she has nothing to do with it and the former chair had to ignore their frequent calls she received.I am glad to hear that some folks seem to have great Scholastic reps sorry to say that can not be said in my area. We got rave reviews for our new company and parents were thrilled we had none of the junk. Our profit was a little less than with scholastic but we were thrilled with the product and service we received . Which in the end was all that truly mattered. Good Luck!
Hi, My complaint with scholastic is the poor selection they send to our school. We have over 1000 kids K-2 and sell about $50,000 in books this is low and falling. We get alot of flack about needing more titles and no scholastic help. I want to scare them into better service by using someone else.
I'm not sure how many years our schools have been with Scholastic but I have been working at the book fairs at two schools for five years and coordinating for two. I am very pleased both with the selections and the service we receive. Our representative from Scholastic is great. She always responds promptly to questions, does what is necessary to get what I need for the fairs, explains complex issues, etc. I hope she stays with them through my duration of doing these fairs.
I run two book fairs simultaneously at our elementary and intermediate schools. We run them the week of parent teacher conferences and in the lower grades, do not sell to the students outright. Parents purchase from a wish list the kids filled out during library earlier in the week. Of course they are able to purchase other items also. Most parents come to the fair while at conferences. We only put out the activity kits, posters, and pencils, etc during the parent buying time. It works great for us.
I love working with Scholastic, attending their coordinator's workshops, the ease of the on-line tool kits and bookkeeping. I really think that it can be the rep you work with that sets the tone of the relationship you will have with the company. It's too bad that it has been soured for some.
