‘A’ Is for Ad as Firms Gain Hold on Campus

Anxious to entice their next generation of customers, corporations are reaching ever deeper into the daily routine of the nation’s public schools.

Just look around a local campus. Candy logos in the cafeteria, soft-drink signs on the football field, posters for breakfast cereal. Schools need money for everything from music lessons to classroom supplies, and more and more, corporations are happy to fill the void--for a price.

* In Irvine, high school students are using $2,000 laptop computers that they bought through their school, which had an exclusive arrangement with Toshiba.

* In Laguna Beach, school lunch menus are printed this year in the “Monthly Munch,” a glossy full-color brochure that features two unlikely representatives--plain and peanut M&Ms--bearing; the message: “It’s plain nutty if you don’t eat healthy.”

* In South-Central Los Angeles, a high school’s hope for more computers hinges on whether students buy enough milk in the school cafeteria to win the National Dairy Council’s Cartons for Computers contest.

* And in Seattle, school officials sealed an agreement with Coke, which will donate $8 million to $10 million over 10 years to the district. But only Coke vending machines will be allowed in the 20 middle and high schools.

This is the campus as marketplace, where along with their phonics and physics, schoolchildren absorb lessons in brand loyalty and salesmanship.

For many years, school fund-raisers have transformed children into mini-entrepreneurs hawking wrapping paper, candy and magazines to their neighbors and relatives. But many schools have found they need to do more than just promote magazine sales.

“Schools have basically become a free-for-all for advertisers to reach kids,” said Brita Butler-Wall, a Seattle parent who opposes the Coke contract. “It turns kids into consumers instead of students.”

Among the recent examples is last month’s offer by ZapMe! Corp., a Silicon Valley computer company, to give 15 machines and related equipment for Internet research to school libraries and computer labs. In return, the schools must make the equipment available for student use during about four hours of the school day.

The catch: advertisements border the computer screen at all times. Still, 8,000 schools have signed up for ZapMe! computers, including campuses in Alhambra and Poway.

School authorities say children would suffer if campuses were closed to business deals. People might object to commercialism on campus, but they dislike tax hikes even more. California voters have passed only about half the school bonds they faced in the past 12 years.

As a result, parents find more solicitations slipped into their child’s backpack each year, with a school occasionally acting as advertiser/endorser, steering them toward buying particular goods.

“Pick the products that can earn cash” for your school, urges a flier that came home this fall to parents at Top of the World School in Laguna Beach. The flier promotes a General Mills fund-raiser: parents buy the company’s foods and hand in the box-top coupons for money.

The cereal maker recently unveiled the details at two assemblies at Dwight D. Eisenhower Elementary School in Garden Grove, where Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) and other speakers exhorted all 677 students to start collecting and earn money for school.

Principal Cheryl Bean says she is well aware that such promotions enlist her school and students to help sell products to parents.

“I’m concerned about that,” she said. But she said the assembly was approved by district administrators.

“What we’re seeing is a field day for different marketers who want to reach kids,” said Marianne Manilov, the executive director of the 5-year-old Center for Commercial-Free Public Education in Oakland, Calif. “Schools are their entry point.”

High Marks for Product Placement

Corporate executives say there is no better place than the classroom to find new customers. Research tells them that if their products appeal to people at a young age, they are more likely to be loyal to that brand for life.

“If we can give a sixth- to seventh-grader a superior experience with a Toshiba computer, then we think that when they’re a sophomore or junior, there’s a good chance that they’re going to buy a Toshiba again,” said Greg Cygan, a vice president at Toshiba America Information Systems Inc.

The company, in a joint venture with Microsoft, is using an estimated 350 schools nationwide as a way to sell laptop computers to students at a discounted price of about $2,000. Schools then develop ways for students to use the computers in the classroom and at home. In exchange, schools sometimes get an extra computer or two, training for teachers and immersion in the most current technology.

To promote the arrangement, Irvine High School officials sent home fliers describing the program and held a presentation in August with Toshiba representatives.

Corporate intrusion? Implied messages that the school is saying Toshiba is a superior computer? Those are not the concerns of Greg Gray, a social-science teacher and network coordinator at Irvine High, who wants his students to achieve computer fluency.

“Public education doesn’t produce its own computers so we’re going to have to buy computers from the private sector,” he said.

But critics of the plan say parents are induced to buy a costly tool solely because a computer company creates a way to use it in the classroom.

“The program shouldn’t be invented in order to justify having it in schools,” said Alex Molnar, the director of the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Promotion by Milk Trade Group

Whether it is soda companies or fast-food vendors seeking exclusive contracts with schools, the cafeteria is a magnet for corporate promotions. The 87 California schools participating in the National Dairy Council’s Cartons for Computers contest must increase their daily milk consumption to compete for the grand prize of $2,000 in food service equipment and $10,000 in computers.

At Locke High School in Los Angeles, the contest was publicized in the school’s weekly bulletin and on the morning announcements that are broadcast campuswide. School officials, who are far short of their goal of having a computer in every classroom, said they don’t mind being part of a company marketing stunt.

“As long as it’s healthy for kids,” said Annie Webb, the principal. “We encourage kids to drink milk anyway.”

Laguna Beach’s lunch menu redesign is the brainchild of Marty Riegler, the food services coordinator. Her efforts have been criticized, she said, by one or two parents who have complained about the level of commercialism in the lunch menus. Formerly, food listings were printed by the district on colored copier paper.

The district is paid two cents per student per month in the arrangement with Tulsa, Okla.-based Exacta Marketing and Advertising, which produces the Monthly Munch for two other California schools in Monterey and San Bernardino counties. Riegler characterizes the advertising as “understated,” including the chocolate candies ostensibly promoting healthy eating.

“We’re not selling them, but [students] are eating them,” she said of the M&Ms.; “At least they’re passing along a positive message.”

Some parents worry about the loss of commercial innocence on campus.

“My children’s values should be framed by something more than what they can get,” said Laurie Leiber, a Berkeley parent. She objected to a proposed contract between Pepsi and Berkeley High School, which was eventually scrapped.

In just three months last summer, the number of school districts with exclusive soft-drink contracts has more than doubled, from 50 to 101, according to figures from the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education. To some parents, the barrage of fund-raising efforts is simply a matter of the end justifying the means. At least it’s in a good cause, they shrug.

“If we want the quality of education for our children to be the best, then we have to do what it takes,” said Linda Krieger, a San Juan Capistrano parent of three middle and high school students.

And in an anti-tax era, the private sector is a constituency school administrators know they cannot alienate.

“We wouldn’t have to have this conversation if the American public would get serious about funding public education,” said Patty Yoxall, a spokeswoman for the National PTA, based in Chicago.

Even the venerable parents group is not immune.

Office Depot obtained the right to emblazon the National PTA’s seal on its advertising circulars this fall by offering the parents’ organization an undisclosed amount of money and laptop computers for every state office. The deal also includes coupons for PTA members and free breakfasts for teachers, who also are handed a gift bag of freebies.

The agreement was devised by the retailer and approved by the parents’ organization’s executives.

“We went to them because no other organization has the same reputation in education as the National PTA,” said Gary Schweikhart, the vice president of public relations at Office Depot.

The Los Angeles Times distributes 8 million copies of the newspaper annually to Southern California schools through its Times in Education program. The papers are typically free to schools and paid by donations from other corporations and subscribers who continue to pay for The Times while they are on vacation.

The papers, which help increase the Times’ paid circulation, are accompanied by lesson plans designed by teachers and educators that describe ways to use The Times in math, English, social studies and business classes. Jan Berk, director of community affairs for The Times, said the lesson plans are tailored to the state’s curriculum.

“We’re trying to provide reading tools for children and parents and have a more engaging relationship with our readers,” Berk said. “We’re very sensitive to commercial advertising in school, and we try to be very tasteful and cautious.”

In the Seattle schools, a district committee found hundreds of examples of corporate endorsements, advertising and peddling.

Among them: posters for Burger King, Nike and Microsoft; coupon giveaways for McDonald’s and Pizza Hut; contests sponsored by K-Swiss sneakers and ABC-TV; book covers advertising Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Calvin Klein and the television show “Melrose Place”; educational materials courtesy of American Express and Crayola. The review group offered several options for policies that would police campus marketing.

Yet last month, the school board approved the Coke contract without discussing the recommendations. School officials said that in today’s fiscal climate, the 47,000-student district cannot refuse company money.

In Evans, Ga., Greenbrier High School became the battleground in the cola wars last March when two students were suspended for wearing Pepsi T-shirts during “Coke in Education Day.”

One of the students, Mike Cameron, said his choice of attire was, in part, an objection to students being used in a publicity stunt to promote the soda.

“I don’t think they should be there during school hours,” he said. “We’re there to learn.”

Gloria Hamilton, the principal, said the prank nearly disrupted one of the promotional events, a school photo. But Greenbrier High still received $500 for participating, and after international media attention, the one-day suspensions of Cameron and another student were wiped from their records. The school superintendent issued a public apology.

Marketing Ban on Campus

In April, the Berkeley Unified School District board unanimously approved what may be the first school policy in the country that limits corporate access to schools.

The policy--drafted after Pepsi offered Berkeley High School a new scoreboard (adorned with the Pepsi logo) in exchange for exclusive rights to sell soda on campus--bans corporate logos from school walls and outdoor scoreboards, and forces company representatives to review their proposal with a committee of parents, teachers and students.

In Washington, U.S. Sen. Richard C. Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, is calling for Senate committee hearings to debate the educational merits of Channel One.

The network donates televisions and other video equipment to schools that agree to show a 12-minute daily news program that contains commercials. It is seen in an estimated 12,000 high schools nationwide, including five schools in Orange County.

Last year, a Wisconsin state lawmaker introduced a bill that would ban all advertising in schools.

School boards across the state are divided over the issue, said Ken Cole, the executive director of the Wisconsin Assn. of School Boards. But he is not. Advertising from the private sector, he said, is not a threat to public education. It’s merely a sign of the times.

“You can’t keep those influences out of the school no matter how pure and sacred you want it to be,” Cole said. “The purity of the environment is an argument that isn’t well-taken. It just isn’t that pure.”

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Times librarians Sheila Kern and Lois Hooker contributed to this article.