Saturday’s New York Times business section had an article describing how cash-strapped states and municipalities are renting out advertising space everywhere they can think of, from local jails (a boon for defense attorneys and bail bondsmen) to the Department of Motor Vehicles (where those captive in long lines are exposed to an endless loop of ads) to, yes, public schools and school buses.
Besides the distressing fact that our kids are being exposed to yet more marketing in their daily lives, these ads sometimes promote unhealthful foods — and seemingly with the imprimatur of the school. Here’s what one mom has to contend with:
“I have a 5-year-old who doesn’t understand what ads are,” says Megan Keller, 30, of Provo, Utah, who says her son Collin, a kindergartner, sees seductive posters for sugary cereals every day in the lunchroom of his public school. “I don’t like that he thinks, ‘Oh, this is good because it comes from my school,’ and I’m having to explain to him why that’s not true.”
The story went on to note:
Pizza parlors and pizza chains are among the businesses that have purchased advertising on school buses.
“When concern about childhood obesity is at an all-time high, and there’s a focus on taking junk foods out of schools, it’s still possible to see ads for those very same products on the sides of school buses,” said [Josh Golin, associate director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood]. “It makes no sense.”
Of course, troubling food and beverage advertising in schools is nothing new. As I outlined in my post, “Nothing Goes Together Like Athletics . . . and Doritos?”
food manufacturers have managed to invade what should be a commercial-free zone through vending machines and “pouring rights”; branded foods (like Pizza Hut pizzas) sold in the national school lunch program; the sale of a la carte foods; the use of Channel One television in the classroom; the creation of textbooks replete with math problems that use the products’ names; give-aways of branded items like textbook covers; offering their products as rewards for academic performance (read X number of books over the summer and earn a gift certificate to McDonald’s); and much more.
But as school districts reel from the latest round of state budget cuts, it seems we might be seeing even more of this practice in the future.
Dana Woldow says
San Francisco schools have had a school board policy in place since 1999 which addresses this kind of marketing to kids, and which has been successfully used to keep our kids protected from this kind of advertising at school. You can read the policy here:
http://www.peachsf.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ResolutionNo95-25A6.pdf
jenna Food w/ Kid Appeal says
dana, you really have thought of everything!
Dana Woldow says
Thanks Jenna, but this school board policy was in place 3 years before I got into the ‘fix school food’ arena. Our long time school board member (and now President-Elect of the California School Board Association) Jill Wynns was the genius behind this policy. As she wrote at the time (in an article which ran in Advertising Age)
“Education cannot be funded by potato chip contracts. Schools must have adequate funding. Every dollar invested in children today returns to us many times later. They’ll pay your Social Security, write the books we’ll read and make the world we hope to leave to our grandchildren.”
It is the opportunity to work with visionary leaders like Jill that keeps me doing this work long past the time my kids graduated out of the public schools.