This is therapeutic writing tonight.

My school is doing a fundraiser. They are asking students to sell trash bags. Part of the money goes to the company. Part goes to the school. Part goes to fund chickens in Africa. By selling at least $20 worth of trash bags, the students get plastic monkeys, so part goes to pay for junk that will likely wind up in the very trash bags (or more reasonably priced ones) that the kids are selling.

As a teacher, and, even more, as a parent, I am angry. My students, my children, are being turned into unpaid salespeople for an organization that makes money off their labor. Even more, they are being told that selling is a “service learning project” that helps “poor people in Africa” so they are being emotionally manipulated. I watched my eldest daughter during the assembly today. I could tell she wasn’t interested in the toys, but her heart strings were tugged by the idea that she could help someone in need. The cacophony of excited children who would get “something” for “selling as much as [they] can” also was too much for a 10-year-old to bear, and she finally was caught up in the wave. My middle child came home, telling me of all the items she planned to sell so she could get every one of the “prizes” being offered. The man from the company successfully manipulated both of my children, and I am furious with the school for allowing that to happen.

I understand that money is tight, but there has to be a better way than manipulating young children, using them as an unpaid sales force, and misappropriating the term “service learning project.” I would be happy to forgo my Teacher Appreciation Week whatever; I certainly do not need another coffee mug or school T-shirt. I would gladly skip out on professionally-lettered “inspirational quotes” to line the walls of the hallway, no matter how pretty or inspirational the stickers might be. I can live another year with broken student computers (given that I’ve had any student computers at all for only one year out of the past six anyway). There have to be things that we take for granted as “needs” that really are just “wants” and without which we could spare our children the nonsense that they endured today.

In the mean time, I now have to defend, to my children, our family’s values against the school’s decision, made even more complicated by my role within the school. My eldest was pleased to learn that there are charities that also help feed hungry people around the world as their main mission. (I didn’t get into the concerns I have with using monkeys as stand-ins for the people in Africa that they are supposedly helping and the racist implications thereof; that conversation may need to wait a little longer until she is more emotionally mature.) My middle child is weighing how badly she wants a plastic monkey versus how much she doesn’t want to spend her own money on trash bags. And I am trying to calm myself enough to help them weather the storm of peer pressure brewing on the horizon.

How do you handle school fundraisers? What is the role of fundraising in schools?