Regina...You have some valid concerns, but I think you take them a bit over the top here. The point of the book fairs is books. It gets children excited about buying and reading books and the teachers and librarians love it because it brings more books into their classrooms for their students to have on hand during class reading times.

If your PTO really told you to let the children buy whatever they wanted, then that is wrong on their end. The children get to check out the books and make a wish list. Then it is Mom & Dad's job to decide which books they can have.
Many parents work the book fairs so that they can look at the books and help their children pick & choose. We also hold our bookfair during back to school night. That way all the parents can look at the books, make donations of books to classrooms & the library, and purchase books for their kids. A good percentage of our parents buy the books for their kids on Back to school night and their kid does not actually buy anything. If your school does not hold theirs at this time, maybe you shoulc suggest it to them.

In our school the kids get 15 minutes one day to look at books and 15 minutes on another day to make their purchases. According to your math figures that works out to $1.85 for the time my kid looks at the books and $1.85 for the time my kid buys books. It is also then $1.85 every day when my kid has snack for 15 minutes. It is also about $0.61 everytime my kid goes to the bathroom.
a 1/2 hour class party comes to $3.71 of school time and a 1 hour class party comes to $7.41. We have about 6 of them a year and some of them last for about 1 hour. Those 6 parties come to about $45 of class time a year.

We are all entitled to our own opinions, but I cannot conceive of running around putting a price tag on every little thing our kids do in school each day. Then who gets to decide what has value and what does not? I personally love books and am glad my kids love them too. My kids love to buy books at the book fairs & I look them over and decide what they buy and even buy some books for them that they did not ask for. It is great to me that day when they run in from school and want to rip open their backpacks to read their new books as oppossed to wanting to turn on the television. To me children getting excited over reading books is priceless.

We just finished our Scholastic book fair at our middle school. We ran it three days to coincide with Parent/Teachers Conferences. This year we were able to use the library so we held the fair during school hours as well as in the evening during conference times. We offered the teachers the chance to bring down their classroom for 15 minutes to browse the fair. They scheduled this with the librarian, only 1 class at a time. We had about 8 teachers participate in this. As a way of thanking them, we donated a book from their "wish list".

We kept the "junk" boxed up during school hours with the exception of some pencils/erasers/bookmarks. Then during the hour when school was over and before conferences, we set up the tables with posters/software, paintsets, etc. Kids that browsed during school hours were anxious to come back with their parents to see all the extra stuff we were going to have out and the parents were there to approve the purchase.

I agree with another poster, an advanced inventory would have been most helpful. One of our problems, I felt, was that we gave teachers a book list that was supplied to make their wish lists from and after perusing the teacher's requests, I found that half of the most popular books weren't even in our inventory. So I had to call and try to get them. Unfortunately most of the books were not available.

I also would agree with the need for more discounted books. We had about a dozen books we could sell for one dollar and sold those pretty quickly.

I think people talking about the ups and downs of Scholastic and bookfairs is fine but I think people need to examine things again. I am new to all this but I just went through a book fair experience as a parent. Perhaps your bookfairs are different than mine was. I am enraged. The procedure in my school went something like this- 1. Children watch a video supplied by Scholastic featuring books at the fair. 2. Children miss their regular library time and instead go and look at the merchandize (aka books). 3. Children make out a "wish list". All of this is happening during our child's school time. State mandated school time. My child has been forced marketed with no input by the parents. Further- the note from the PTO says something like "parents should let the child choose what they want." Does anybody see the BIG problem here? What if they were selling Barbie dolls and GI Joes? - (they did sell Barbie books.) Would a school allow Mattel or whoever makes these toys to come inside the school and force commercials on them and have them parade past a pink and camouflage colored isles? What if schools were then having students then make "wish lists" of these toys and then tell the parents that they should not interfere with their marketing genius by daring to make a decision about what is to be bought? My children are not objects to be marketed to whether it is books or anything else.
Perhaps other schools do not do this during classroom time and I have no problem with that. If anyone has the illusion that this "makes money" I would have you do the math. The cost per pupil for a school year last year in my town ran over $8,000 Divide that number by the number of days of school (180 for my child)= $44.44 per day. It costs $7.41 per hour to keep my child in school. Multiply that by the number of students of 225 and you get $1667 per hour to run our school. I don't know how long the video and the library vistits and the wish list took, but it might have taken two hours of student time. Does Scholastic Offer to pay $3334 for the rosy opportunity to have an impressionable audience delivered to then make money from? Not only is valuable time is taken from our students and delivered to them for free, but they are profiting from it! Yes it is shameful but it is business. They real shame is on the School and the parents who allow their children to be subjected to this abuse of trust.

Well, maybe it's our rep. then. We have called multiple times and STILL can't seem to get the books we need in--took the payment so they could get the book (by their request). And as far as the books go, we have asked and asked and asked. This was pretty much scholastics last shot with us. It's definetly their customer service that is the biggest problem.

I am a member of the Scholastic Customer Advisory Board which was formed last January. This board consists of 16 other members representing chairpersons and media specialists from across the country. As members of this board we provide Scholastic with input from a customer's point of view and are able to answer questions and offer our 2 cents when needed. Since becoming a member of this board I can tell you that they READ every survey mailed in and are very interested in providing better service to all of you out there. We are a sounding board to them and have provided them with an earful!Some good and some not so good. And yes, they do listen. They are constantly trying to improve and I believe that if you talk with your sales rep about your problems - they will listen and take care of you. You need to talk to them. If you do not want so many trinkets, you need to tell them. However, some trinkets are a necessary evil. ( I know that from my own experience and I have done book fairs for 5 years now and run 4 a year.)


To A&C MOM: I have a book fair that goes 2 days!. I had many problems with reorders. It is a problem Scholastic is very much aware of. You have a week. You should not have a problem getting your books in in that amount of time. (Our last fair was the best we ever had, concerning reorders! I give them a 9 -Finally.)Are you calling the reorders in on time? Ask for more books and explain that they are not shipping out enough, initially. Sometimes, though, you can't predict which books are going to fly off the shelves. Especially with younger children. They see their friends with a particular book, and the next thing you know everyone wants the same one. We could use a crystal ball - lol!

They really are a good company and do respond to the customer! Good communication is a must though.

We had our Scholastic book fairs in October. We had 3--one in high school, middle school and then elementary school. I co-chaired all 3 book fairs. We were disappointed with the high school book fair--the kids weren't interested in the books--i don't know if it was oh your a nerd to buy a book or they really didn't want any of the books-it was the same books as middle school with a few more adult ones. This was our first year doing a high school sale. Middle school was as suspected--about what we do every year. Elementary school we did awesome!! We had Clifford make a visit on family night and we had an awesome turnout for that. Do you all have viewing days where the classes just come down to look and then come a few days later to shop--we usually reorder books before we even sale them as we see alot of the students wanting these books we go ahead and order them. We did end up having to wait on a few reorders because well i don't know why but they did not come as promised--you know call before this time and you will have them the next day--was more like 3 days later. The chair person and myself did attend scholastics preview over the summer so we got to see before hand what type of books we would be getting in our bookfair. We really have no complaints except the reorders need to come as promised.