I get really angery when my two children come home from school with numerous catalogs filled with everything from overpriced popcorn to cheap home decor with a note attached reciting how important it is to “support our school”. I always try to sale at least the minimum, if not my poor children get left out on the day of the “prize give- aways”. Some prize. A plastic finger puppet that dentists give away after every teethcleaning. Sure support the schools…but hey…ease of my children for awhile man.
My kids get those too! and subscriptions to ovepriced magazines nobody reads1 WTF??? they make MONEY like this???
Send home some chocolate bars, I can sell them or eat them, but fuckkit you will make some money.
That junk-store shit doesnt sell.
…skyblukat, what else have you tried, besides selling the stuff for them? Michaela is in kindergarten this year, and I’m giving serious consideration to forbidding her participation in these activities. I have always refused to buy the junk from other school kids (yes, and their parents), both on the grounds that I don’t buy useless junk, and that I insist on all transactions being a real-time quid pro quo. In other words, I want it immediately when I choose it, and I will pay for it immediately. I’m also troubled by the fact that our society has calmly accepted the notion that it is necessary for our children to go around hawking anyhting just to be able to have the good things in their schools that my generation received as a matter of course (music classes, art supplies).
Howard Jarvis, I hope you’re in hell (even though I don’t believe hell, as such, exists).
Last year I did not participate in any of that nonsence but it left my children feeling lost in the shuffle and saddend because the other children got their dime store prizes, so this year we sold only the minimum, yet it still felt wrong. Like my children were manipulated in some way.
I started a thread about this a year ago. My neice sells a lot of this stuff, and I think it is sad that the kids don’t get more of the cut. Seems to me the companies are getting the lion’s share of any monies raised. I don’t think kids should be used like this.
When my mother had children in school, she would simply donate money directly to the activity that the fundraiser was for (debate, swim team, whatever) and send along a harsh note for the coaches and administration about how she would not allow her children to participate in such cheap and ludicrous activities.
If you find yourself buying a lot of crap for your kids’ fundraisers, you might consider this as the alternative.
I make my newspaper and yearbook students do these fundraisers, and I hate them too. As hard as we try to choose products people might actually want, it’s just a pain in the neck to manage and I’d rather be teaching.
But if we don’t get the money from them, we won’t have enough to print the yearbook- and boy, I’d hear from the parents then.
Yesterday a woman at school told me that her eighteen-month-old son’s preschool is fundraising this way.
Yes. Eighteen months. I guess that completely removes the pretense that the kids are selling the crap because there’s no way a kid that age could possibly be doing it.
No kidding. The one my daughters bring home (Cherrydale Farms - overpriced crappy gift wrap, mediocre candy, popcorn and knick-knacky shit) says right on the envelope, “Do not go door-to-door by yourself. Give it to your parents to take to work. Ask your parents to call their friends.” Sheesh. :rolleyes:
The pizza kits are actually pretty good. Three plain cheese pizzas for about $13-$14 dollars, IIRC, a bit more for pepperoni and other extras. I don’t know how much money they make off of that one, though.
I don’t buy any of it. I also won’t let my son sell any of it. I’m not letting the school system pimp him out.
We live 2 blocks from an elementary school and the kids come by selling crap on an almost daily basis. The vast majority (probably more than 90%) are unescorted by parents - even after dark. Most of the schools here have a monthly fundraiser!
Quite refreshingly, the school he’ll be at next year asks for a $50 donation at the start of the year to cover activities (per student - not per activity) and does no selling. That, I can handle.
Don’t EVEN get me started on the soda machines in the elementary schools around here …grrrrrr…
When I was a kid and we had these fundraiser sell-a-thons, we did go door to door selling the stuff. I hated it and when I look back on it now I can’t believe I wasn’t abducted.
[hijack]
I didnt know chocolate bars had butts, and how could I make money if I do this
[/hijack]
[sub]runs for his life[/sub]
what about the grand old girl scout tradition?
they sell those boxes for like 3 bucks (with less cookies and more package every year it seems).
and the troop itself only makes like 50 cents a box, if that.
and, while I’m at it:
I HATE that they expect parents to shill their crap (school fund raisers).
and then you have 4 or 5 co workers selling the same stuff (their kids all go to the same school) and it becomes a fucking popularity contest of sorts.
Girl Scout cookies are YUMMY.
But yeah, I hated this too. When I was a freshman, they would make us sell fifteen candy bars for 1 dollar each, the money to be put away for our prom. If you didn’t collect the money, or sell them-they WITHHELD your report card!
Fucking bastards. And I didn’t even get to go to the prom, because you weren’t allowed to go stag, or with a group of friends.
BTW, who is Howard Jarvis?
Gaah … I remember having to sell “World’s Finest” chocolate bars. “World’s Finest” is like what RC is to Coke and Pepsi, or Crackin’ Good is to Lays or any other major chip manufacturers.
Was. He’s dead now. But back in 1978, he and Paul Gann managed to ignite a “property tax rebellion” of sorts, with Proposition 13 in California. Actually the rebellion already existed, but their initiative instituted what became the solution of choice to the problem of spiraling property taxes, and it spread to other states. The end result is that the cure was arguably worse than the disease, and school districts saw their funding bases undercut considerably.
Ya know? I really dont seem to mind the cubscouts and girlscouts selling. I guess you kind of see why they would be doing it. Just something about the school system persuading them to sell for an education that they are already suppossed to get for free.
what back-ass-ward school did you go to, guin? they didn’t let you go to the prom because you didn’t have a date?? hell, they let me go to prom and i didn’t even go to that school! neither did my date, two friends gave us their guest tickets.
i totally agree that these fundraisers are total shit. but how can you not let your kid participate without making them feel bad?
there are a few other things that i disagree with in regards to kids, but i don’t want mine to “miss out.” for instance, i don’t think it’s right to lie to kids and tell them that santa claus really exists, but i still tell them stories about him. for them, he’s no more real than cinderella or bob from veggie tales. my s.o. has religious objections to halloween, so we compromise by letting them dress up, as long as it’s not supernatural (ghosts & devils, bad. cowboys and princesses, good.), and taking them to a church to play games and get candy.
but how do you compromise something like this? you either let yourself and your kids be used as slave labour, or your kids feel left out. what do you do?
I’m hoping I can raise Michaela to be subversive enough that she actually feels good about eschewing soul-sucking indoctrination.
sure, maybe in high school. but i can’t imagine a six year old being able to see past mommy and daddy not letting him do something that all his friends are doing and that the school told him is GOOD.