The Colossal Scam of School Fundraisers
In the early morning hours of a late August night I lie awake in bed. It’s hot as balls and I can’t sleep. I usually never have insomnia, but I think my solo consumption of a full French press - plus a late afternoon large stoneware cup of mate tea - has now just fully hit its peak. The combo of the heat and the double-tap caffeine spike has me sweating like a hog. A caffeine high sucks. Sweaty, irritable bowls, over active bladder, and of course the ever present shadow of anxiety lingering around with no apparent purpose. At least cheese-induced anxiety can be turned into something useful – à la this online journal.
No matter how much I toss and turn I can’t get comfortable. I can feel the caffeine pulsing through by body like acidic electricity. This fucking sucks. After getting up to pee for like the fourth time, I feel a slight physical relief. Perhaps in relieving myself I have expelled the last of that toxic electric acid. I crawl back into the damp and clammy sheets, still uncomfortable, but now finally ready to fall asleep.
As the body begins to enter its sleep mode, the mind resists. Old and decrepit childhood memories arise to taunt me. This is how the consumption of too much caffeine can lead to madness. The anxiety shadow doesn’t show you anything psychedelic, but it instead reminds you of the most cringe experiences from childhood. Steve Miller might have been right when he said that the Joker is a “midnight toker,” but in my experience the Joker is actually midnight caffeine induced anxiety. It’s as if the caffeine molecule is saying: “Listen here’s the deal, you want more energy, fine. But in exchange for that energy, I’m going to take you back to seventh grade and remind you of the cringe Valentine’s Day card you gave to a girl that you had a crush on, only to be laughed at by your little league baseball buddies for being totally ignored by the girl.”
The caffeine joker just won’t let go of its grip. Memories of striking out over and over and over and over again in little league; getting in trouble at school for ripping my Beyblade too hard – you gotta really let it rip though if you want to be alpha; LARPing with wooden swords around the neighborhood until well into the early teenage years. Then, as if the Joker has one last thing to show me before letting go, I am reminded of the school fundraiser. The often biannual event at school where everyone assembled in the gym to learn about selling magazines, but also to more importantly eyeball all of the toys and electronics offered as prizes for the top sales- … sales-child?
Despite being a foggy and dusty memory, my eyes quickly open and I sit straight up in bed. “What bullshit!!” Seriously, the amount of fundraising events that I attended and participated in during my school age years must be in the magnitude of hundreds of hours! And for what? Where is all of the money that I raised? Who in the hell profited off of my child labor? The caffeine Joker taketh, and sometimes, the caffeine Joker giveth. I knew that after I got some actual sleep I would have to investigate this further.
I. The 2000s Kids
Despite now being a nation of 320 million people scattered across 50 different states, there is one experience that unites most: public school. For all its faults – and there are many – the public school system is one of the greatest innovations of this country. Don’t get me wrong though, I am not referring to the academic “integrity” of American public schools. I have many thoughts about that, but now is not the time. What I am referring to as the “great innovation” of the American public school, is the cultural landscape that is both reflected and simultaneously created at school. Schools are not only live petri dishes of bacteria and viruses, they are also live petri dishes of American culture. With just the introduction of simple material influences from the outside, you get the rise and fall of entire civilizations that leave permanent marks on American society and history.
In the 1950s the American school was a battleground between the jocks and the nerds. After school students would go to the diner or the dance hall, and the bourgeoning hipster movement inspired by the Beat Generation would begin the introduction of cheese into the public schools. I am happy to report that even as late as 2013 with a little work and persistence you could score some cheese at school. Then in the 1980s it was the jocks and the burnouts. After school students would go to the newly built indoor malls and lay havoc to the orderly norms of American consumer behavior. The 1990s got a little weird. The goths and the hicks began to make their presence known. Yet, despite their cringy behaviors they added valuable archetypes to the mix.
I entered into the state mandated education system in the year 2000. A new millennium, a new century, a new found hope that a techno-utopia can and will be achieved. Unless you were a Y-2K weirdo, this was the time to be alive. Or at least so I’m told, after-all I was only five-years-old. This optimism didn’t last long though. A minor recession, a dubious election which resulted in the spawn of Satan taking the White House, and only 21 months into the new millennium a horrific act violence that continues to traumatize nearly two decades later. Shit hit the fan, and it hit quick.
It is in the 2000s and early 2010s that my odyssey through the participatory cultural environment of the public school took place. As a child of this generation, I along with my peers experienced some of the most extreme changes thrust upon youth that perhaps any generation of kids has ever experienced. Most of us had cellphones by middle school, and by the time we reached high school the place to hang out after school was Facebook. To be quite frank, I think this experience sort of fucked us up as a generation. This shared generational experience is definitely worthy of academic investigation. We’ll probably even take a stab at it here in The Cheese Den. But unlike the generations of youth in the past where the archetypes were set and the rules of cultural participation were clear, the 2000s kids grew up in time where identities didn’t really matter. There were very few spaces where we could freely interact with each other.
The 2000s kids became a generation of ghosts. Some of us became ghosts through abandonment, because there was “no more room” for more sub-cultures. You can find it all online now, so why even bother. Some of us became ghosts through hyper-participation in sports and extracurriculars. The experience akin to putting on a new identity every day with the reinforced expectation that we are to perform perfectly and succeed. After all there’s always the risk that there’s something better online. Whether through abandonment or through hyper-activity, we became a generation of ghosts because the adults became more enraptured by new social technologies than their own children, and they thought we would feel the same way too.
Not all is doom and gloom, it never is. In fact, I wish my peers who felt abandoned and didn’t make it out had heard that. There were some areas of shared cultural experience where we all were able to “participate,” despite how insanely dark those experiences were. School lockdown drills and standardized testing are among the more grim shared experiences. There are some shared experiences though that are so blatantly off-base, so cringe, that as a generation we have to revisit them. The midnight caffeine Joker reminded me of one of those shared experiences – the school fundraiser.
II. Propaganda and Politics in the Schools
Participation in school fundraisers began practically on day one for me.
I entered the first grade in the fall of 2001. I don’t have many memories from this crucial developmental period. I am not sure if that’s a bad sign, but it is what it is. However, there is a particularly strange memory I do have from the first grade. Granted, it’s fragmented and likely more of a reflection of my emotional state at the time. The memory is as follows: I wake up sometime in the morning hearing my grandpa down the hall in the living room loudly saying “HOOOOOOOLY SHIT!!!” Later that day I am in the car with my mom driving over to my aunt’s house. My mom is crying as we drive and listen to the spawn of Satan talking on the radio.
This is my memory from September 11, 2001. It’s very fragmented, and I honestly couldn’t tell you much more about my experience from that day. Over the years I have come to realize that I can’t rely too much on the details of that day as memories. We’ve all been bombarded with thousands of images and accounts from 9/11, so by default I try to be cautious about what I believe are my personal memories. More often than not what I remember from that day is likely the manufactured collective memory of 9/11. The point here is that my memory of one of the most harrowing days in this nation’s history is nothing but fragment, a squib. This memory, however, was soon to be co-opted by a sinister and propagandistic wartime fundraising drive.
I may be wrong, but I believe the first school sanctioned fundraiser that I participated in was “America’s Fund for Afghan Children.” In the weeks following 9/11 things got really weird in our country as the political class started to manufacture consent for the eventual – and now endless – War on Terror. Beginning on October 7, 2001, Dubyuh’ and his team of chuds gave the green light to the U.S. military to begin operations in Afghanistan. The terrified and traumatized American public wanted justice, and they overwhelmingly supported this action. Five days later in an evening press conference from the East Room of the White House, Dubyuh’ solidified this country’s lust for war by not only reinforcing the narrative of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice, but also that the U.S. military would now be liberating the people of Afghanistan. As a sign of goodwill, every child in America would send $1 to the White House that would then be donated to the children of Afghanistan.
The elementary school that I attended was located in a conservative area, so naturally the teachers ate up the opportunity to participate in the wartime fundraiser. My memories of participating are again fragmented and foggy, but surprisingly pleasant. I remember coming to school with a one dollar bill in an envelope, and learning how to properly write an address – in this case to the demonic lair that is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We then as a class walked to the post office, which was just down the street from the school, to drop off our letters and toured the mail sorting room. As a six year old it was pretty freaking sweet to see all the mail trucks and sorting machines. After dropping of our propaganda notes we then went to the nearby grocery store to learn about produce. I remember getting the chance to try a piece a of star fruit – something that my parents never had at home.
And that’s that. My first memory of participating in a school fundraiser is actually a pleasant one. It’s only when looking back into the post 9/11 milieu that this fundraiser takes on a sinister tone. My personal memories of 9/11 are essentially blank, perhaps faded at best. My connection to that day is more of an emotional connection to how the adults were reacting. Similarly, my first memory of a school fundraiser is very foggy. Seeing the mailroom of the post office and eating star fruit were cool, but I honestly had no idea why I was mailing a dollar to the White House. My fundraising actions that day were solely to make the adults feel better about living in a wartime country. Without any awareness of the greater forces at play, I went to school on the day of the fundraiser and became a tool for propaganda and politics.
I sometimes wonder if a kid my age in Afghanistan ever received my donated dollar.
III. The School Fundraiser
In the 2000s public schools in Minnesota became a testing ground for “fiscal conservatives” – aka chuds - to implement dramatic budget cuts. Even as a child I was aware that the schools were in bad shape when it came to money. Until well into high school pretty much all videos were on VHS, teachers regularly used thirty-year-old transparency projectors, gym equipment was musty, and it wasn’t rare to have a class size of upwards of thirty pupils. Clearly the dreams of a techno-utopia didn’t factor in the public school system.
Just like any person who is in perpetual poverty, the public schools became easy prey for hucksters and con-artists who knew just how to take advantage of this desperation. These leeches swarmed from across the country with their catalogues of crap and marketing might to convince school administrators that their fundraising program would be the one that solves all of the problems. If there is one scam that all Americans fall for at one point in their lives, it is the “get-rich-quick” scam. Whether through independent contracting, mid-level-marketing, mining for precious metals or even bit-coin, American’s LOVE their get-rich-quick scams. Some of the more learned among us would probably explain that this is a natural outcome of our insane national mythology of pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. But putting cultural analysis aside for a moment, it is clear that as Americans we have a seemingly primal and masochist urge to get financially ripped off if it allows us the opportunity to fantasize about being rich.
Through my many years of school fundraisers I saw it all: magazine sales, popcorn sales, cookware sales, bakeware sales, Christmas wreaths, coupon books, movie tickets, silent auctions, and even candy bars. Whatever school official believed that last one would raise any money seriously needs to get their brainstem examined. In talking about this article with Ingebretsam he reminded me of another fundraising scam – Box Tops for Education™. A literal proof of purchase receipt found on the boxes of the most sugary and poisonous breakfast cereals that would be collected by schools and redeemed for cash. This is how I imagine neo-feudalism works. Each school year marked another nine-month tour of duty in fundraising.
While the products being sold varied year to year, the fundamental mechanics of the school fundraiser didn’t. Each year, and usually twice per year, all of the students in school would gather in the gymnasium for an hour-long presentation on the fundraiser. On each seat would be a catalogue of products as well as an order form. After taking our seats, a funny and charismatic representative from the fundraising company would begin his pitch. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable this must have been for the teachers, because surely someone who is funny and charismatic to a nine-year-old should not be allowed on school property. The sales pitch was mainly just a demonstration of the cool prizes that kids could win if they made enough sales. These prizes ranged from small trinkets all the way up to electric scooters and Nintendo GameCubes. The most exiting prizes were the ones that we got to play with in the moment. I distinctly remember the slingshot flying monkey being one of these toys. Then at the end of the presentation we were told when the due date was for the order forms. Teachers, fearing that this year’s crap sale fundraiser would fail, would then take it upon themselves to enforce the order form due dates just as they would enforce the due date for a homework assignment. As a kid it was clear that participating fundraiser was an expectation – but hey, with prizes that’s not a bad deal, right?
The real OGs of the school fundraisers were Grandmas. Each year they would be the number one customer for little Timmy or little Suzy; their dollars barely keeping the school afloat until next year. While Grandmas are generally great and their support for grandchildren is admirable and should be recognized, one of only ways for the school fundraiser to work is by exploiting the alienation that exists among families under current conditions. Today most Americans no longer live in inter-generational households, so the first customer outside of the home was usually Grandma. If Grandma has a lot of grandchildren, well, she’ll probably be expecting a lot of calls during the school year.
After Grandma, however, the potential customer base drops off sharply. Aunts and uncles have their own kids and fundraisers to deal with, neighbors are an unlikely option given most people don’t even know their neighbors’ names, and your parents’ coworkers are a very unreliable option. Essentially, in order to succeed in a fundraiser – and to have a chance at winning the GameCube – your family had to have enough social capital where they could risk fatiguing some social connections with perpetual fundraising requests. This reality does not exist for most middle class families, and especially not for working class and poor families. My family, like most, got through the fundraising drive with the occasional call to Grandma and by purchasing one or two items for our own household. I never won any prizes from the fundraiser, but since my family was middle class I could at least count on Christmas for cool toys. I do wonder, though, what the dynamic was like in the more financially burdened households of some of my classmates. What about the kids who had no grandma? What about the kids whose parents had no extra money for the fundraiser, let alone Christmas? The tension, stress, and further alienation among families cultivated by the school fundraiser was entirely unnecessary.
IV. What did we learn?
In dusting off the memory of the school fundraiser I have been reminded of one of the more bizarre shared experiences from my youth. Thinking back on it makes me cringe. What role did the school fundraiser play in my generation’s upbringing? What did we learn from this experience? Well for starters, nearly a decade of experience has proven that it is impossible to win a Nintendo GameCube from a school fundraiser. In fact, you win nothing from participating in a school fundraiser. It’s a scam, and a colossal one at that.
I wonder how lucrative the school fundraiser is for the public school. Surely it must be lucrative; why else would administrators continually invite these shady launderers of crap into the school? Unless there is something else at play here. Maybe the school fundraiser is actually an unintentional crash course on how to stay afloat in our increasingly atomized, hypernormalised, and thoroughly capitalized society. The irrational American Dream has evolved to its present state where the line between productive and consumptive action has been blurred. In order to make it in this county you have to have believe in the fantasy that by buying you are actually creating. The school fundraiser was the perfect enchantment for a young sponge-like audience. Teach them while they are young, and they will become loyal workers citizens consumers.
Ultimately, the repercussions of the school fundraiser become quite harmful when considering the students who were never able to participate in what was supposed to be a shared cultural experience. Students whose families didn’t have the financial resources, who couldn’t turn in an order form despite persistent nagging from the teacher, probably saw early on where their place was charted in American society. Despite being a shared generational experience, the school fundraiser likely hurt many youth who have carried that trauma into adulthood. That is a problem, and it is something that only we as a generation can work to remediate.
Shawby
August 29, 2020