School Bingo Harmless Fun? Some Wouldn’t Bet on It

My dad loved the track. His mother loved bingo. By the time I was 12, Grandma and I regularly played a dice game called bunco for nickels and dimes. Luckily, I never developed the gambling bug, realizing in time that I risked getting to like the ponies a little too much.

Like me, the overwhelming percentage of adults resists getting hooked on gambling.

The same goes for children and teenagers, but as society widens its embrace of gambling--through lotteries, card clubs and casinos--some see a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I sat around a restaurant table several years ago with four Orange County high school boys as they talked about the hundreds of dollars that changed hands every year on their campus during Super Bowl week and the NBA playoffs.

It’s that kind of concern, I think, that prompted a Laguna Niguel mother to call me with her mild protest over a magazine-sales program at her daughter’s middle school.

She wasn’t furious, but the issue is worth airing. Saying her daughter “would kill me” if she went public, the mom didn’t want to be identified.

She acknowledged that the program is voluntary and that students, like her daughter at Niguel Hills Middle School, love it because the more successful sellers qualify to play bingo and win prizes or can get up to $50 cash playing other games.

To this mother, the payoff opportunities amount to a form of gambling.

“It frightens me that we have such little money invested in education that we have to use our kids to go sell things and use them in such a low way, by enticing them with gambling so the poor schools can raise money,” she said. “I think that’s a mixed-up priority.”

Principal Jim Henderson is a veteran school official who said he respects the parent’s concern but differed with her interpretation. He said the bingo-playing and the chance to win cash are rewards for their efforts, in the same vein that the top seller gets to be “principal for a day.”

Besides raising money for the students’ activity fund, the sales program is meant to be fun, Henderson said. Of the school’s 1,600 students, some 80% to 90% take part, he said.

I can hear a lot of people tsk-tsking at the mother, saying she’s overreacting. I don’t share completely her concern about the Niguel Hills program, but I think her antennae are generally pointed in the right direction.

Joanna Franklin is the executive vice president of the National Council on Problem Gambling, with headquarters in Columbia, Md. In general terms, she said, a seemingly innocuous school program with only a token nod toward gambling “might not mean a thing,” because youngsters learn to play Monopoly, bingo and other money-related games and it can be a natural part of their development.

Nor is the council “anti-gambling” for adults, Franklin said. “It’s here to stay. We don’t believe in prohibition, and we’re not trying to make it go away.” But where schools may err, she said, is in not alerting parents and students “about the potential hazards of gambling in youngsters.”

“Our data tells us that, for adults presented for treatments, most of the males we see started at the ripe old ages of 8, 9, 10, 12 years old,” Franklin said. Studies have shown that 2% to 4% of adults have a gambling problem, she said, but noted that one large study of 5,000 preteens and teens found as many as 4% to 7% with a gambling problem.

So while bingo would be harmless fun for 95 out of 100 youngsters, Franklin said, the game might trigger something potentially troublesome in a handful of students. And for the same reasons schools stand guard against irresponsible drinking, driving, drug use or sex, Franklin said, so should they about gambling.

“If you’re going to offer something that has that potential, even if it’s for a minority of kids, you need to put safeguards in place,” Franklin said. While preferring that schools not introduce any form of gaming to its students, officials should at minimum have information available on its potential pitfalls, Franklin suggested.

“These same teachers and parents who would never think of putting on a little kiddies cocktail party and show them how to mix and sample drinks or give awards for who makes the best Manhattan--that’s ridiculous--they don’t think of gambling as potentially hazardous,” Franklin said.

Yet for that occasional fifth-grader who might get more stimulated than his classmates over a game of chance and who might have a family predisposition for a gambling addiction, a seemingly harmless game might set them off “in search of more and more and more,” Franklin said.

Calling problem gambling a “billion-dollar cost to our society,” Franklin said schools understandably fall into a trap because youngsters are taught from infancy that games are fun.

“Schools don’t want to do bake sales or carwashes, but if they run a mini-Vegas night, they say, ‘Everyone has a good time guaranteed, we get money out of it, and what’s the harm?’ ”

The answer, Franklin would say, could be found at any Gambler’s Anonymous meeting, where men talk about how their problems began with flipping baseball cards or pitching pennies.

Once upon a time, it all seemed so harmless and fun.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.