Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools

A sampling of speeches given during the presentation of the Ad Slam award to the Seattle School Board (June 12, 2002).

Brita Butler-Wall

Good morning! On behalf of the Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools, I am delighted that the Seattle School Board is the winner of the first national Ad Slam contest, in recognition of their national leadership in adopting a district-wide policy that significantly prohibits many types of commercialism in our schools.

Picture this -- Five years ago, an 11-year-old Seattle student started her morning by watching Channel One commercial TV, then walked past the student store display of M&M's and Snickers to Math class, where the teacher distributed Pringles potato chips as part of the math lesson.

On the way to lunch, she picked up a couple of large ads for Nike in the Counseling Center to use as book-covers, and glanced up at the Ricearoni poster in the lunchroom, before spending $1 of her lunch money to buy a 16-oz. Coke from the large, lighted vending machine right outside. After lunch, she attended an all-school assembly where she won a prize for selling the most See's candy and then stopped by the main office to enter a contest requiring her to design a T-shirt featuring the name "Nordstroms" -- her school's 'corporate partner'. At the end of the day, she headed out past the Pepsi logo on the school readerboard on her way home.

At no time during the next three years was this middle school student given any information about any of these corporations or products nor get did she get any instruction about health, nutrition, or media literacy. By June of 1997, Seattle schools had become a free-for-all for marketers.

Working to achieve a district-wide policy that addresses these forms of commercialism in Seattle schools has truly been a grassroots coalition effort, and I want to thank our individual supporters and organizational allies who, together, represent over 170,000 people.

The coalition includes those closest to schools:

• Hundreds of parents, including many PTA members.
• Classroom teachers from Kindergarten through high school, and educators from every institution of higher education in the region
• Individual students who have discussed the issues, written about them, and testified to the School Board
• Our campaign includes strong support from school employees and the King County Labor Council, many of whom are seriously impacted by the encroaching privatization of public schools.

In fact, everyone who pays taxes and lives in Seattle has a vested interest in our schools- Our coalition also includes:

• Thousands of ordinary citizens - from homemakers to the homeless, from CEO's to CPAs and everyone in between
• Our supporters include Elected officials, including members of the Seattle City Council, King County Council and the state Legislature, as well as leaders from six different local political parties
• The leaders of the ethnic communities in Seattle, in particular the Coalition to Undo Racism Everywhere and its 25 member organizations
• The many members of the clergy -- In fact, the Church Council of Greater Seattle helped sponsor one of the first forums on commercialism in 1997.

The Citizens Campaign owes much of our success to the media-particularly the independent media - for helping us get the message out. Our Seattle community is wonderfully diverse, but on the issue of commercialism in schools, we speak with one voice. I want to thank the entire Seattle School Board, and President Nancy Waldman in particular, for listening to the voice of our community, for taking the time to learn about the underlying issues and for working hard to develop a policy that protects our children from those who would take advantage of them.

Finally, the Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools would like to express our gratitude to Gary Ruskin and Commercial Alert for their constant vigilance, support, and absolute dedication to protecting the integrity of our schools, our communities, and our democracy.

Our Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools has depth, breadth, and tremendous momentum. We are now helping communities in Olympia, Skagit Valley, and Bainbridge Island to develop their own commercialism policies. There are a million children in the state of Washington, and they all deserve a properly-funded, commercial-free education.

Thank you.

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles

Good morning and congratulations! It is an honor to be here today celebrating your success. Five long years of hard work and dedication have finally paid off. Thanks to the Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools, the Seattle School District now has a thoughtful, uniform policy on commercialism - a policy that will protect the learning environment for 47,000 students who attend one of Seattle's 100 schools.

Your work is trend-setting:

• The Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools is the first winner of Commercial Alert's Ad Slam contest, chosen from scores of applicants from throughout the nation.
• You made your case to the Seattle school board that commercial advertising in our schools is not to be taken lightly.
• You helped the board show national leadership with its forward-thinking philosophy and policy.
• You have succeeded in ousting Channel One from Seattle's classrooms.

And, perhaps most importantly, you have raised our awareness that funding for public education should not fall to the hands of multi-million dollar corporations who benefit from access to our children. We must give our schools better options to support the programs that make them great.

Like many other states, Washington is still reeling from the effects that the Sept. 11 attacks had on our already weakening economy. Our state budget was short 1.5 billion dollars last session. With a deficit of this size, we had to look to all state agencies, programs and services for solutions - including our schools. And the prospects for next session don't look any better.

It seems almost cruel to tell our schools - especially those that struggle the most for funds - not to take whatever they can get, even if it means increasing advertising in the hallways and classrooms where our children spend many of their waking hours. But this is a slippery slope that has no has no end.

What we need to do - as parents, teachers, administrators, lawmakers and members of our communities - is come up with more creative and stable ways to support public education.

We in the Legislature have been working hard to help districts keep up with expenses. Last session we came very close to passing a bill that would have allowed the state's voters to decide whether school levies and bond measures should be able to pass with a simple majority, rather than the supermajority currently required. And we have been able to honor Initiatives 728 and 732 to reduce class size and provide our teachers with an annual cost-of-living raise.

All of you are perfectly aware these issues - keeping dollars in and advertising out - are ongoing battles for our schools. Each step in the right direction is a victory.

Again, congratulations to all of you who joined this fight for a policy on commercialism in Seattle's schools. Let's hope your success will inspire school districts throughout the state to implement similar policies, so that the integrity of learning will remain the top priority in all our schools.

Alexandra Bradbury

Hi. I'm Alexandra Bradbury. I graduated last year from Garfield High School.

I worked with the Citizen's Campaign for Commercial-free Schools for many years. I think what first pushed me to get involved was that I was indignant at the idea that corporations were paying off the schools for the chance to try to manipulate me. In my spare time I was free to choose not to watch commercial tv, but during school hours I was a captive audience. Even though funds were scarce, the state had no right to give away my legally mandated time as a commodity for the school district to sell.

As I got more deeply involved, I started to think more broadly about the system that the policy ultimately promotes. Because corporations must always push to increase their profits, they pour money into advertising, which works by making people feel an inadequacy, a lack. If the goal of business were simply to sell people what they already needed or what they already wanted, advertising wouldn't be necessary. People buy what they really need anyway. The function of advertising is to manufacture need.

This huge national investment in making people feel they lack something has ramifications for our whole culture. To some extent we have all come to define ourselves by what we buy. The scholar bell hooks has written very eloquently about the ways that the corporate-driven consumer culture reinforces the grave inequities of class and race that permeate our society. Changing the ways we all look at our consumption will have to be part of the project of breaking down those oppressions, as many students and other community members are coming to understand. That's part of why, at the rally here last week, the group Youth Undoing Institutionalized Racism asked the School Board to keep stepping up its anti-commercialism efforts.

Sometimes people argue that commercialism in the schools hardly matters in a culture where we are deluged with ads all day, every day. It's true that the problem is much bigger than schools and that ads affect people of all ages, not just kids. Paradoxically, though, I think it's exactly because ads are everywhere that it's so important to begin by getting them out of schools. As much as schools everywhere are plagued with institutional problems, they also carry great potential to be part of the solution. As long as schools remain in the business of selling consumer culture, they encourage youth to define themselves as consumers. But as they leave that behind, I'd like to see schools instead take proactive steps to support us in developing our identities as citizens of a community. Rather than conditioning students to accept their places in the consumer order, school could be providing us with the tools to critically evaluate that order and begin to change it. It's a daunting charge but an inspiring one. I think it is part of the same challenge that has been presented to the school board in different ways by many different community groups in recent years. I am heartened by the new commercialism policy, which I hope is one of the district's first steps towards taking on that difficult, important work.

Thank you.