What’s Next: (Your Firm’s Name Here) High School?

It took half of second period to hang the big corporate logo on the Locke High School gym wall. The students finally managed. In fact, they hoisted four big corporate logos--two regular ones and two for the manufacturer’s new girls’ line. The chore was compensated for by the fact that everyone was getting out of class to prepare for this special “motivational” assembly, featuring a fashion show by a clothing company. Deshawn Edmond compared it with the last clothing company to “motivate” his South-Central Los Angeles campus on school time.

“That one was Dada, I think,” the 16-year-old remembered. “Yeah, Dada. They mostly sell shoes? They were here right before spring break. Student council hooked ‘em up, and we modeled their clothes at lunch. They gave me some black pants--nice! I liked them so much, I bought a shirt three weeks ago, like $15 at Footlocker or someplace like that. Although, actually, my uncle ended up paying for it.”

This was Tuesday, a regular school day. This assembly would consume most of the morning for about a thousand upperclassmen. Deshawn said he’d heard that this company, a New York-based subsidiary of Fila, wouldn’t be giving away much free merchandise. A pity, considering the subsidiary’s department-store prices. Out on the gym floor, a teacher conferred with the company’s co-founder, an African American guy from Seattle who was barely into his 30s. The teacher was wearing a new T-shirt with the company’s name--

“Enyce”--emblazoned on it.

“The reason for this assembly,” the teacher, Reggie Andrews, announced as things got started, “is to motivate you to be all that you can be. This company is worth more than $50 million, started by a young brother who developed his own idea.”

Then the deejay cranked up the music, 21 student “models” paraded out in Enyce outfits and some show business friends of the company materialized in Enyce’s signature hip-hop attire.

Finally, as a preface to a Q-and-A with the co-founder, a young movie actress named LisaRaye turned--motivationally--to the captive demographic:

“You know these people don’t have to do this for you, but this is their way of giving back. And you know why? Anybody know why? Because you guys are their No. 1 buyers! So you know what you’re gonna tell your friends when you leave here, right? ‘I got Enyce and the price was da bomb!’ ”

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Now, it can be argued that galloping commercialism in the public school system has its hip side. This is why its critics tend to come off as uptight scolds. Really, now, are those fast-food logos in the school cafeteria such a threat to America’s little darlings? Is it so very dire that your kid’s district is raking in thousands of dollars for putting Pepsi in its vending machines instead of Coke?

A few months ago, Studio City’s vaunted Carpenter Avenue Elementary let Ralphs supermarkets in to do an assembly on nutrition. The principal, Joan Marks, says she warned that if they started advertising, she’d cut them short and send the kids back to class. And they obeyed, unless you count the fact that, after the importance-of-a-

good-breakfast segment, they gave every kid a stuffed Tony the Tiger.

Now, was it terrible that a key point got driven home by the Frosted Flakes pitchman? True, the school might have used its own freebies in its own nutrition lessons, Marks concedes, “but who would have paid for it?”

So it goes in the gray area inhabited by the modern, impoverished, public school system, which is now so starved in poorer quarters that the ACLU is suing over it. How to resist all that can be obtained for the low, low price of a little targeted attention? What’s the cost-benefit? The Locke High principal, Annie Webb, wasn’t apologizing for Tuesday’s hip, inspiring, up-close infomercial. Neither was Andrews, who has spent his 32-year career teaching in L.A.’s less affluent neighborhoods.

“Hip-hop culture is a multibillion-dollar industry,” Andrews reasoned. “There are jobs out there, opportunities out there. We already give these kids math and history and all that, but this is relevant to where their heads are at. To hear from someone successful who looks like them, that goes farther than you realize. Besides, these kids are too smart to be played.”

And maybe they are smarter than the advertisers that hound them on their TVs and computers and lunch hours and teachers’ T-shirts. Maybe they’re all so steeped in it, they’re inured.

Or maybe a choice has been made, motivated by the ease, now, of letting private logos pay more and more of what civics teachers used to say was the responsibility of the public. Back when there was time for civics class, between ads.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.