Thanks for the input! I mentioned this issue because it came up in my "Too Good to be True?" thread in fundraising. Our school district does have a policy in writing, but it's so vague and loose that there's way too much room for interpretation. I have too admit, as long as the kids aren't being asked to watch commercials, I don't have a problem with corporations sposoring things in schools and asking to have their name displayed. Let's face it, if I gave someone a lot of money, I'd want recognition too!

As far as I know, there is no written policy on advertisements, per se. Most of the smaller fundraising type stuff at individual schools, like a "school spirit" night at McDonald's, where they donate a percentage of the night's take to your school, seems to be handled at the discretion of the individual principals.

But, our district does heavily promote "business partnerships." With some of these, corporate names are very heavily promoted--sometimes related to educational benefit, sometimes just due to monetary benefits. You might want to dig around here and see if any of this helps you at all: www.fcps.edu/Superintendent/BusIndustRelations/index.htm

Well, waaay back in '92 when I was in high school there was rumor of cutting out advertisement in our schools. My history teacher said that would mean no more snack machines, RC, machines, and no more Channel One because they had so many sponsors. Channel One was fairly new to us and that was 10 minutes of "free" time. We actually liked it and was not happy about the no advertising rumor. The same high school not only still have their RC and snack machines but they have Purity milk machines and they get ice cream at lunch and other drinks that were never available to us. So apparently the advirtising thing didn't fly to well. That is my experience. I don't know if it helped or not.

Anybody?

Since this has been a beef of mine in less related topics lately, I figured I'd give it is own thread. Like the subject says:

"Advertising" in schools--Good? Bad? What is too much? Does your school have a written policy? And my big question:

What IS advertising in schools--isn't most fundraisers we do really just a thinly veiled ad to begin with?

I ask because I'm going to TRY to diplomatically broach this subject with our district's administrator (and hopefully superintendent) tomorrow sometime if I can get a hold of him. Our school board has been really hard-nosed and evasive on what construes an advertisement, to the point where they were seriously considering not letting us put little plaques on our playground equipment saying "A gift made possible by _______," and they just nixed a "Cut-A-Thon" my group was offered by a local salon for our playground fund because they felt since we were naming a specific salon as the sponsor it was "advertising."

While I understand they would want to avoid ANY HINT of impropriety, be it them pushing an interest of theirs or squashing a competitor, I also feel that if (in our case) they aren't going to cut the pork from the administrative budget to make up for the things our kids need besides books and teachers they have little right to tell us as concerned parents that we can't have a certain fundraiser because THEY see it as "advertising."
Hmph--so there! [img]tongue.gif[/img]