Commerce on Campus

With soft drink vending machines and fast-food logos sprouting in school hallways, cafeterias and sports arenas, one district has taken an unusual stand against galloping commercialism.

Declaring that San Francisco’s schoolchildren are not “for sale,” the city’s school board last month approved a policy to limit commercial advertising and paid endorsements in the city’s public schools.

The measure is the strongest in the nation, where cash-strapped schools are adding another R--as in retailing--to their mission of readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic. Plagued by chronic underfunding for sports, arts programs and computers, schools across the land are turning to increasingly lucrative deals with soda producers, candy and chip marketers and fast-food franchisers.

Schools generated an estimated $750 million in revenues from vending machines in 1997, according to the trade journal Vending Times.

Those are high stakes. But the movement toward exclusive contracts for Coke or Pepsi, many of them multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts with big strings attached, is generating controversy along with revenues.

A few districts nationwide are bucking the trend, speaking out against in-school advertising.

“More and more schoolchildren are viewed as markets rather than as the future resource of the nation,” said Jill Wynns, the San Francisco Board of Education commissioner who wrote the new policy. “It’s our responsibility to make it clear that schools are here to serve children, not commercial interests.”

The spreading commercialism alarms consumer advocates, who see it as exploitation of a captive audience of impressionable youngsters. Exclusive contracts with vendors, they contend, could induce students to develop lifelong preferences--and not particularly healthy ones--before they have explored all options.

Teachers and parents complain that learning suffers when students have easy access to sugar-, caffeine- and fat-saturated products.

Advertising of any sort in schools undermines the integrity of a public education, some critics of advertising say.

“It promotes a consumer mentality,” said Andrew Hagelshaw, senior program director of the Center for Commercial Free Public Education, a nonprofit group in Oakland. “There’s no denying there is a financial gain [for schools], but in the long run it costs more in terms of the nutritional choices they’re forcing on kids.”

Companies and school administrators counter that vending machines have been on school grounds for decades and that schools finally are benefiting from them. Soda companies note that they stock the machines with healthful juices, bottled water and sport drinks, in addition to soft drinks, and limit the hours when students may buy the products.

For many schools, the funds generated are not small change. In Chula Vista, south of San Diego, the Sweetwater Union High School District last fall signed an exclusive Pepsi deal that will bring at least $4.5 million to the district’s 20 schools over the next 10 years. The money will pay for technology, library books, intramural sports, band and school-to-career programs.

Cola companies say that their aim is not to intrude on the classroom.

“We try to become a part of the school’s life but never a part of the curriculum,” said Dave DeCecco, a spokesman for Pepsi-Cola Co.

Amid this lively debate, commercialism in schools is becoming ever splashier.

* In Henrico County, Va., schools have agreed to become franchisees for Subway, Taco Bell and Domino’s Pizza.

* The roof of a middle school in Grapevine, Texas, is adorned with a Dr Pepper logo that can be seen by passing planes.

* Oakland teachers attend programs sponsored by Nike in which they learn how to teach a two-week unit on recycling sneakers.

* Channel One, an advertising-supported daily news program watched by 8 million students, runs promotional campaigns, enlisting teachers to hand out discount coupons for J.C. Penney jeans and Subway sandwiches.

Opponents say that the drive to boost funding has turned school administrators into product hawkers.

Last September in Colorado Springs, Colo., a school district official sent a memo to principals, exhorting them to crank up sales of Coke products to meet a quota or risk losing revenue. Signing the letter “The Coke Dude,” he urged schools to consider allowing students to drink Coca-Cola’s juices and teas--if not soft drinks--in classrooms.

Similarly, an Ohio schools superintendent wrote recently in the American School Board Journal that a bidding war between Pepsi and Coke enabled his 2,600-pupil district to negotiate a new exclusive Pepsi deal that is expected to yield more than $700,000 in benefits over 10 years.

“We could have negotiated an even larger contract,” he said, “but we are trying to strike a compromise between those who think we would be foolish to turn down Pepsi’s money and those who fear we are selling our children.”

Wynns, the San Francisco school board commissioner, said the city’s policy was prompted in part by an offer from Donald G. Fisher, founder of Gap Inc. He pays for field trip transportation for the San Francisco Unified School District if students and teachers travel in buses covered with ads for Old Navy, a Gap-owned chain.

The practice turns schoolchildren into “little ads for Old Navy,” she said.

San Francisco’s Commercial Free Schools Act, which passed on a 5-2 vote, forbids any districtwide, exclusive contract with a soda or snack food company and requires that ongoing corporate sponsorships be directly approved by the school board. It also bans on-campus sales of any products made by tobacco companies or their subsidiaries and bars teachers from using textbooks or other lesson materials that include brand-name advertising.

Most districts, including Los Angeles Unified, have no process for reviewing in-school advertisements or corporate-sponsored educational materials.

San Francisco’s policy was approved after it became known that school officials, without seeking public input, were considering an exclusive contract with Coca-Cola Co. Since the passage of the policy, the district has hired DD Marketing, a Pueblo, Colo., broker, to negotiate with a variety of soft drink companies on the schools’ behalf. Such nonexclusive contracts are typically not as lucrative.

Dan DeRose, president of DD Marketing, defends the idea of exclusive deals, which he continues to negotiate on behalf of dozens of other schools and districts. Acting on their own, he said, schools tended in the past to get about $3 per student annually in returns from cola companies. His company, he said, has been able to raise the figure to $25 per student or more.

If pressed, he said, most taxpayers would prefer vending machines and other school-based marketing to higher taxes.

“I know there are some parents that knit their children’s socks and are concerned about every thread,” DeRose said. “To the typical American, it is not a concern.”

But the spread of commercialism worried Sarah Lipson in San Francisco. A relatively new first-grade teacher, she said she and colleagues are bombarded throughout the school year by corporate-sponsored materials in the guise of educational lessons. Jelly Belly recently offered to supply materials, including handouts of its jelly beans, and invited students to tour the company’s factory. Some teachers went along with it, but Lipson declined.

“A lot of teachers don’t think about what the impact could be [on students],” she said. “I hope San Francisco can lead the way for other districts.”