Scholastic Book Fairs & Book Orders
My sister’s three year-old son came home insisting that the whole family go to the evening Book Fair. Clifford (a favorite of his) had come to visit his preschool classroom!! And so, wallets in hand, they went, their first in what will undoubtedly be dozens of Book Fair arm-twisting — um, I mean invitations.
In our school, we’re a few weeks away from our spring Book Fair. It’s our two book fairs that fuel the PTA funding that gives us the discretionary spending to improve our aged collection, diversify its holdings so that we have fiction that better reflects our diversifying student body and its interests, and buy new tech tools like camcorders, digital cameras, Web space to house our multimedia projects, extra online subscriptions, etc.
But the arrival of Book Fair brings with it the inevitable conversations as parents and I unpack the boxes. “Is this educational?” “Do we have to put this out?” And contractually, we do … though I admit that we’ve “forgotten” to put out things a few times. (I’m sorry, but my elementary girls do not need a book telling them how they can look better, which, by implication, tells them they are not good as is. And if there’s one thing we’ve got in spades in our school, it’s upper elementary girls with confidence … why blow that?)
As a school community, we are in a bit of a trick box here as we uneasily set up the toys display. We need the profits to buy high-quality materials for the library. Book Fair profits bring us the money we need to innovate and give our kids access to 21st-century technology tools and resources.
We also know that our building community is warily watching the ups-and-downs of the Big 3 automakers. Whether you think those companies have been responsible or not, the bottom line is that The Old Way of Doing Business paid for the wallets out of which came the twenty-dollar bills to pay for big Book Fair purchases. And clearly, that paradigm is undergoing seismic shifts literally by the week. So what we dangle before kids holds higher weight than it used to. (And for those of you out there whose states are just catching up to Michigan’s years of economic downturn, you know this, too.)
So here are two articles that are on my mind:
- Wired magazine catalogs the quantity of toy items featured in the book order brought home by the reporter’s child in, “Does Scholastic Deserve a Passing Grade?”
- The New York Times’ “Scholastic Accused of Misusing Book Clubs” strikes a similar theme.
I try to reassure my sister that while Scholastic does feature a lot of pop culture stuff (and has since our own childhoods), it also has a remarkable knack for snapping up really high-quality stuff. But to a kid, what could be more high-quality than a mechanical hand or a tornado-in-a-tube???????
March 15th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
I used a local bookstore for my fair this fall. I never actually achieved a “profit” from a Scholastic Fair in my school and got tired of kids complaining that they always sent the same books (and BTW–I NEVER put out the trinkets. I went as far as telling the rep not to send them because I would not display them because it is a BOOK FAIR). So, I found someone who would allow me to create the book fair I wanted. Tons more work, but worth the effort.