Infusion or Intrusion?

Students returned from their holiday break early this month to find something new on campus.

Coke machines.

While soft drink machines have been fixtures on campuses for years, what makes these different is the same thing that distinguishes Michael Jordan’s Nikes and Farmer John wieners at Dodger Stadium.

A contract reached last month with the soft drink giant makes Coke the official soft drink of the Conejo Valley Unified School District. While the schools didn’t receive the millions of dollars that Jordan’s face and name command, Coca-Cola Co. sweetened the deal with almost $100,000 for the schools to spend however they see fit.

A school campus was once considered a sacrosanct place where the goal was stimulation of the mind, not the marketplace. But these days, when there never seems to be enough money for books and classrooms, brokering deals with corporate America has become commonplace.

“Although you would see Coke or Pepsi on a stadium scoreboard, that’s really the tip of the iceberg in terms of how successful partnering has been,” said Stan Mantooth, assistant superintendent of business and personnel services for the Ventura County superintendent of schools office.

Consider these examples of corporate sponsorship on Ventura County campuses:

* In Fillmore, a Coke-donated marquee in front of the city’s high school announces upcoming events and achievements. In the classroom, students brush up on current events each morning while watching Channel Onecomplete with commercials.

* At Adolfo Camarillo High School, Saturn of Oxnard turns the schoolyard into a car dealership every spring.

* In Oak Park, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza cater student lunches.

“Nearly every school has some sort of business involvement,” said Charles Weis, the county superintendent of schools.

While local educators describe the growing relationship with business as positive, some observers are beginning to question whether school campuses--and students--should be put up for sale to the highest bidder.

This month, Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni (D-San Rafael) introduced two bills that would curb corporate relationships with public schools. One bill would end exclusive contracts like the one in the Conejo Valley and the other would prohibit commercial brand names or company logos in state-approved textbooks.

“At some point, you have to say, ‘Enough. It’s not appropriate. Our students are not for sale,’ ” Mazzoni said.

Marianne Manilov, executive director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education in Oakland, said partnerships with corporations not only damage the educational process, they violate its fundamental tenets to be islands of learning.

“The question is: How is marketing now starting to hurt and impinge on our learning times?” Manilov said. “Schools are really becoming a mall.”

Local educators reject that notion, saying schools get far more than they give away. And with a dramatic decline in funding in the past 20 years, schools have had to find a way to make up for that deficiency.

“Schools had to look somewhere for the funding . . . and developing the partnerships with business was excellent,” Mantooth said.

As schools have developed more of these relationships over the years, there has been growing concern about the effect on public education--and the students.

Several years ago, a nationwide controversy erupted over students watching Channel One. And an Evans, Ga., teenager made headlines in March, when he was suspended for wearing a shirt with a Pepsi logo on “Coke Day.”

But corporate influence isn’t slowing down. Over a three-month period last summer, exclusive contracts with soft drink companies more than doubled, from 50 to 101 nationwide, reports the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education.

In Oak Park, student menus are filled with items provided by McDonald’s, Subway and Pizza Hut rather than the generic chicken nuggets and corn dogs.

Last fall, Camarillo High signed an exclusive contract with Pepsi.

The Oxnard Union High School District tried to get a bidding war started. After starting negotiations with Pepsi, the district went to Coca-Cola for a counteroffer. Pitting the two companies against each other won the approval of the editorial staff of the school’s newspaper, The Stinger.

“Pepsi is offering scoreboards; maybe Coke will offer a swimming pool,” an editorial said. “Pepsi might up their offer to include an amphitheater, and Coke might retaliate with the promise of a stadium escalator.”

In the end Pepsi won. The company wrote the school a check for $35,000 and agreed to give the school 45% of vending machine profits.

Four of the six high schools in the Oxnard district have exclusive contracts with either Coke or Pepsi.

Bob Phillips, a spokesman for Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Southern California, said businesses have a responsibility to contribute to schools. But he insisted that corporate America is not trying to train students as consumers.

“The important thing to remember is these contracts are developed by school districts . . . [they] have ultimate control over what goes on in their schools.”

In Los Angeles, student groups can broker their own deals with major companies, but the district has a policy against districtwide exclusive contracts.

“We don’t feel that it opens up the market and allows for competition,” said Susie Wong, director of purchasing for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

From cafeterias to classrooms, corporate influences are finding their way into almost every activity engaged in by public schools.

Consider Channel One--a national news service designed to deliver news at the grade-school level. The 12-minute program packages the news in ways students find compelling but which Manilov complains bombards the youngsters with commercials.

In Santa Paula, teachers try to make up for the loss of educational time by tacking on two minutes extra to the school day, said Randall Chase, assistant superintendent of business services for the Santa Paula Elementary School District.

When schools sign up for the cable program, they receive free televisions and a camera to broadcast their own news. The benefits the school district receives are worth thousands of dollars and would be impossible for such a small district to fund on its own, Chase said.

“The pros outweigh the cons,” he said. “Sure, I don’t like watching commercials, but that’s the price I have to pay to have a free program.”

Besides commercials in classrooms, schools have begun working with companies to participate in curriculum development.

Delores Rawlins, business department head at Camarillo High, teaches a senior English class that spends a portion of the semester learning about the auto business through a partnership with Saturn of Oxnard. Students learn the ins and outs of marketing, finance and customer service. They also hear lectures from salespeople and even take a tour of the dealership.

The project culminates when students transform the schoolyard into a mock dealership for a day in June. A handful of Saturn models are put on display and students act as salespeople.

“It doesn’t matter if they are going to college or the work force,” Rawlins said. “The skills they get they can use right away.”

Teaching lifelong skills through industry partnerships is what Berkeley-based EdVenture Partners set out to do in 1991, when the company began supplementing the standard curriculum with skills that students can use in the real world.

“I think companies are trying to break through the clutter, to be perceived as a company that has the hearts and minds of the students at stake. And not in a goody-goody way,” said Tony Sgro, the company’s president. “A lot of these kids are going to be working for corporate America; you might as well put your name in front of them if you can.”

EdVenture Partners has operated programs for more than 25,000 high school and college students, among them the program at Camarillo High School.

Sgro says industry is in a unique position to provide real-world, contextual learning.

“What is the compelling difference between what happens before 2 o’clock and after 2 o’clock? It’s still the world,” Sgro said.

School districts of all sizes have gotten more sophisticated about working with businesses, Mantooth said.

But it wasn’t always that way, points out Steve Carr, director of technology for the Hueneme Elementary School District. He remembers years ago when schools were thrilled to receive any type of offer from a corporation.

“We weren’t savvy enough to say, ‘Well, what do we get out of it?’ ” Carr recalled. “We were giving them a lot more than we were receiving.”

In the Oxnard Elementary School District, parent Suzanne Drace taught the district how to deal with local companies. She started an adopt-a-school program two years ago to establish business and school partnerships. The marketing and sales specialist turned homemaker began going door-to-door in Oxnard, asking businesses if they would donate to the district’s schools. What she found was a community eager to help.

“It was more showing them how their business could create a school business program,” said Drace, who is also president of the district’s education foundation. “It’s looking for how can the relationship benefit the business, and how can the relationship make the community stronger?”