Gifts Special Needs and Issues - Corporate America Goes Back To School

Schools have entered into deals with soda bottlers to sell their product exclusively at school vending machines, cafeterias, and extracurricular functions. Each district earns a "sponsorship" fee for signing the contact. The figure varies — three South Bay, California districts recently earned between $200,000 to $275,000 for recently signing with Pepsi. They also earn annual fees, and a share of vending sales — loosely translated, the more soda sold, the more money for schools. Some contracts give districts some control about what gets sold in vending machines — water and juice is sold along with soft drinks, for example. But some contracts can be highly specific. The Public Health Institute reports that one soft drink firm stipulated that a district must have a vending machine for every 150 students, can't limit the hours of operation and that 85% of the items sold must be large, 20 ounces bottles of the firm's product.

Fast-food advertising in schools seems to have begun in 1993, according to Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation. District 11 in Colorado Springs became the first public school district to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of its buses. The district had sold the advertisements in the face of a revenue crunch. Initially, their efforts were a disappointment. However, in 1996, the district turned to DD Marketing Inc. to help them renegotiate this deal. By putting together special advertising packages, the firm's president Dan DeRose was able to triple the district's ad revenues. In 1997, he went on to broker a 10 year deal with Coca-Cola to bring the district's revenues up to $11 million over the life of the contract.

Schools get $750 million a year from companies that sell snack or processed food in schools. What do kids usually purchase from vending machines? According to a vending survey done by Automatic Merchandiser, soda was the most purchased item, followed by chips and candy. Junk food has become a staple of young people's diets — it's fast, easy and tastes good. A California high schooler described her typical lunch — and perhaps the lunch of more than a few classmates — in a New York Times article: "Lunch for me is chips, soda, maybe a chocolate ice cream taco." Diabetes and heart disease? Showing up in alarming rates in teenagers? She shrugs. "That's all I like to eat — the bad stuff."

Bad stuff indeed. Young people now drink twice as much soda as milk. Children are consuming more of these beverages, and have begun to do so at a younger age. Almost half of the children between 6 and 11 drank pop in 1996-97, with the average drinker consuming 15 ounces a day. Teenage boys are the top drinkers. In 1977-78 they consumed roughly 16 ounces daily; by 1994-96, that figure jumped to 28 ounces, according to the Department of Agriculture. Girls have increased consumption as well, from 15 to 21 ounces in the same period. Consumption has gone up in part because serving size has increased, notes the report Liquid Candy. A standard serving was 6.5 ounces in the 1950s. We are now looking at 20 ounces bottles — three times the sugar and calories.

Big business isn't just in the halls and cafeteria, either. It's shaping the curriculum as well. The rising cost of textbooks has forced some districts into using corporate-sponsored teaching materials. Fast Food Nation cites a few examples: Procter & Gamble's Decision Earth program taught that clear-cut logging was good for the environment. A study guide from the American Coal Foundation dismissed the greenhouse effect claiming that "the earth could benefit rather than be harmed from increased carbon dioxide." Not all the materials had such one-sided viewpoints, of course. Even in states-sponsored material, commercialism shows up. A math textbook published by McGraw Hill, Mathematics: Applications and Connections asked students how much money they needed to save to buy Nike sneakers. The book also taught fractions by using M&M candies. Media and brands mushroom all around these kids. Channel One beams 12 minutes of news and advertising into 12,000 middle school and high schools daily. But many companies also sponsor contests that pay for badly needed equipment and computers.

Things are changing in some districts. More districts are refusing solicited soda deals. 10 districts refused in October 1998, 21 in July 1999, and 43 in July 2000. The Oakland school district banned all snack food sales in February 2002 and is looking at losing $650,000 in the process. Senator Charles Schumer has called for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to promote milk vending machines in schools as a way of boosting the nutrition in students' diets.

Sources: Chart data comes from the Center for Commercial-free Public Education and is quoted in Henry, Tamara. "Coca-Cola Re-thinks School Contracts." USA Today, March 14, 2001, p. 1. Timothy Egan. "In Bid to Improve Nutrition, Schools Expel Soda and Chips." New York Times, May 20, 2002, P. A1. Stacey Meacham. "K-12 School Market." Automatic Merchandiser, April 2002, p. 12; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, 2002.