Reply to Best and Worst of PTA events?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Former PTA President. Our Scholastic book fairs (we had 2, fall and spring), raised over $30k for the school, at no cost to the school. You make it a social thing (kids come in their PJs from 7:00-8:15, teachers rotate through reading books), and the kids love it! Plus, older kids get to practice math skills when it's not too busy - that's going to cost $12.42, and you gave me $12.50, or $15.00, how much change should ypu get back? Parents also like to buy books frim the wishlist created by their child's teacher for their classroom.

Not sure why all the hate over books that encourage kids to read! Again, no one forces you buy the books. You think it's too expensive, skip it! [/quote]

Ugh..spoken like a true book fair groupie mom. The school always has a handle of moms that love this stuff while everyone else hates it. My favorite is the comment at "no cost".  You spent 60+ hours of volunteer time making money for scholastic and feeling important about your big book fair job. [b]You blocked out the media center for a week. [/b]

You claim it inspires reading BUT the merchandise from Scholastic has been significantly shifting to toys, pens and other crap.[b] The books are not good quality but the fun yet crappy ones like Diary of  Wimpy kid etc.[/b] They'll throw in one or two good titles but overall its pretty mediocre to bad. Book fairs are not about literacy anymore than Boosterthon is about health. Its just not. The teachers don't love taking time out of class to take the kids to book fair. Do the kids love buying a cute eraser and pencil sharpener. Of course, they do! They would also love an arcade to unlimited ice cream.

[b]From a $$ perspective, many, many parents are only purchasing things from your fair because the kids are begging, don't want to be left out or they don't know that 75% goes back to Scholastic. For the quality of books sold at Scholastic, many would much prefer to just get those at the library. 
[/b]
Our school did a donation drive for used kids books and then sold them for $1 at the school carnival. This made a lot of money that 100% went back to the school. Since all books were $1, the poorer kids weren't stuck buying the 1-2 titles prices at $2 that Scholastic begrudgingly provides. They don't see their richer friends walking away with the expensive hard cover books. [/quote]

+100!

HATE the Scholastic book fairs.  Agree that it's crappy that the kids don't get media for two weeks a year since the book fair takes over, and the kids can only go if they want to shop.  Agree completely that SO many of the books are just CRAP.  Enough with the Shopkins 'books' that are really not even books.  I'm not a literary snob by any means, but I feel like 60% of the Scholastic options are junk.  [/quote]

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