All the fund-raising materials our children's schools have ever sent home to us have gone directly into the trash. I've never subjected anybody else to a sales pitch for this stuff, and I ignore all those, however worthy they seem, that are directed at me. Workplace selling is the worst aspect of the whole business. Parents are coerced into becoming shills and teamsters, selling and lugging this stuff for the "good" of their kids' schools. Just raise my taxes or hold a bake sale.

-- Tim Strane

I will vote "yes" in any referendum on whether to raise taxes to benefit the schools in my city (and have done so in the past). However, I will not buy junk from small children wandering door-to-door hawking crummy merchandise. It's one thing when children do fund-raising to finance something special, like a trip; it's another thing entirely when they're being asked to sell kitsch to all their friends and neighbors (and, yes, total strangers) to buy chalk and playground equipment and other basic necessities.

I consider these sales programs to be exploitative: They exploit the desperation of teachers for more funding, the cooperative (and naturally greedy) nature of small children, the reluctance of parents to rock the boat by refusing to allow their children to sell and the kindness of strangers who don't want to say "no" to a bright-eyed little kid.

-- Naomi Kritzer

The 5-year-old needs to sell 100 products to win a $35 CD player. The writer suggests that this can be accomplished in 10 hours for a rate of $3.50 per hour. At this rate the kid is making a sale every six minutes, which is very unlikely. But it gets worse; what self-respecting parent would let a 5-year-old go out by herself? Therefore, you must divide the $35 by the 20 hours represented by two people, one of whose time is no doubt worth far more than $1.75 per hour!

-- Rowland Williams

Bob Whitby just dredged up some repressed memories from my years of attending Catholic schools -- the annual fund-raising drives. Girl Scout cookies sold themselves, but having to sell cheese and sausages and, even worse, raffle tickets where the grand prize was a Cadillac DeVille (this was in the early '80s when anything sporty and foreign was much more desirable) was sheer torture. My parents refused to help by selling at the office since they rightly considered it tacky to pressure co-workers to make purchases of useless crap. I usually ended up buying a unit or two of whatever it was I was supposed to be selling just so I could make quota for my classroom without having to endure more futile door-to-door efforts. I'm sure my parents could have handled paying the extra $20 in tuition that my sales efforts brought in, and when I have kids, I'll teach them to just say no to this kind of child exploitation.

-- Kristin Abkemeier

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