St. Augustine High School in New Orleans has had one of Louisiana’s top basketball programs in the ’90s, but its head coach, Bernard Griffith, wasn’t anyone special when it came to buying the team’s shoes.
He would shop the manufacturers’ representatives for the best deal and then purchase them from the school’s athletic budget.
All that changed Jan. 31, the day St. Augustine rose to the No. 1 spot in USA Today’s national boys high school basketball poll.
An Adidas representative soon provided the team with 20 pairs of basketball shoes and similar numbers of T-shirts and warmup outfits, all free. Converse Inc., from which Griffith had bought the team’s regular shoe allotment before the season, sent 15 free pairs.
And after the season, which ended with St. Augustine’s winning both state and unofficial national titles, Adidas and Nike representatives sought to outfit the team free for the 1995-96 season.
Nike won. It will provide 60 pairs of shoes, 20 travel bags, 20 T-shirts and several coaches shirts.
“It’s advertising,” said Griffith, who as an economics teacher has found this sudden largesse an interesting lesson in corporate marketing. “Kids attach value to who wears a product.
“We’re a walking commercial, I guess.”
More and more, big business is seeing potential profit in schools, from high schools to elementary schools and from the gym to the classroom.
At Providence-St. Mel School on Chicago’s West Side, it’s Big Macs in the cafeteria. In Colorado Springs, it’s Burger King ads on school buses.
The relationship between businesses and schools is hardly new, but almost everywhere you look, corporate America is starting to make a bigger splash in the schoolhouse. The payoff is not only in marketing impact but also in access to elementary and high school students, who spend more than $70 billion a year.
Many cash-strapped schools-public and private-seem ready to deal. It’s a way not only to receive badly needed equipment and educational materials, but sometimes also to attract role models. After all, who can better prepare students for the real world than those already in it?
There are, however, growing concerns that schools should be free from the influences of corporate competition and commercialism. Some argue that when schools let big business invade the classroom, students are being forced to promote one product over another, becoming pawns in the often-bloody battle for market share.
“Once schools jump into bed with advertisers, students lose,” said Charlotte Baecher, director of education for Consumers Union, the Yonkers, N.Y.-based organization that publishes Consumer Reports magazine. “They are basically being sold to the advertisers by the schools-and that’s unfair.”
Baecher co-authored “Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at School,” which decried the spread of commercialism into the classroom.
“Schools do need corporate America’s help,” she said, “but with no strings attached.”
Business and education are in full partnership at Providence-St. Mel, 119 S. Central Park Ave. A McDonald’s restaurant opened in the 750-student, K-12 private school’s basement in April.
While fast-food franchises had been selling their products in schools for several years, a McDonald’s official said Providence-St. Mel has the first restaurant in an elementary or high school building open to the public.
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Principal Paul Adams approached company officials two years ago about opening an outlet in his school because the cafeteria’s food was unpopular. The officials said a student-only operation wouldn’t be profitable but agreed to open a restaurant in the cafeteria that would serve the public.
The restaurant employs 16 students, who put 75 percent of their $4.25-an-hour salaries toward their tuitions. The school keeps half the restaurant’s profits.
“For inner-city schools struggling to find some additional income, this might be a way,” Adams said. “If we’re successful here, I can assure you you’ll see these things popping up all over the world.”
If McDonald’s in a school is unusual, consider Colorado Springs School District 11, where the entire school system has been offered as a billboard.
District officials, reeling from a budget crisis, last year devised what they call an unprecedented plan to sell ad space. They solicited ads for everything from school buses to the employee directory.
“We virtually offered our entire school district,” spokeswoman Tracy Cooper said.
The district sold space on buses to Burger King, 7-Up and the local utility company, which painted their ads all over the buses.
In Illinois, five educational organizations joined forces about a year ago to try to take ideas similar to District 11’s statewide. The Illinois Association of School Administrators, Illinois Principals Association, Illinois Association of School Business Officials, Illinois Association of School Boards and Illinois High School Association have formed the Illinois School Licensing Cooperative to generate corporate dollars for schools.
In one program, companies would pay the cooperative to use a logo on their products. Funds would be distributed to all schools.
The cooperative also is developing a new program in which companies would buy ad space in gymnasiums, hallways and buses, said Wayne Sampson, IASB executive director. Participating schools would sign up annually for a bloc of ads that would be uniform throughout the state and receive a cut of the revenue.
The cooperative’s credit card program is further ahead than the other two, according to IASA Executive Director Walt Warfield. About 200 districts and 1,000 card holders are participating.
School supporters sign up for the card through Magna Bank of Illinois. Half of one percent of each sale goes to the district of their choice.
So far, big bucks seem more dream than reality in the alliance between corporations and schools. Colorado Springs’ results have been less than stunning: It has raised only $65,000 thus far and sold space in only 12 of its 150 buses.
When it comes to high school sports and free shoes, however, corporate involvement, though modest, has been steady and growing.
Adidas executive Sonny Vaccaro estimates that Nike had free equipment deals with 10 basketball teams when he left the company in 1990. Nike spokesman Keith Peters says the number now stands at about 75 schools, most of them boys basketball teams and most of them highly successful.
Since joining Adidas’ U.S. subsidiary about 2 1/2 years ago, Vaccaro says he has extended free equipment deals to about 20 high-profile teams.
According to Peters, Chicago-area high schools receiving free Nike boys basketball equipment include Deerfield, Farragut, King and Simeon. Adidas schools include Carver and Westinghouse.
Thornton got free shoes and travel bags from Adidas last season, when it finished second in the Class AA state tournament, but switched after an aggressive courtship by Nike.
“Nike made us feel really wanted,” said head coach Rocky Hill, who admitted feeling some pressure to justify that attention. “Nike does not court anyone but the best.”
Peters said the increase in schools getting free Nike equipment was partly the result of a shift in the company’s promotional focus but also a response to Adidas’ entry into the fray. He said he expects growth to “maybe 100 (schools) but not to hundreds.”
Shoe company officials say they dole out free equipment in part because it often benefits cash-strapped athletic programs and players, who on most teams buy their own shoes. But they admit it helps market their product.
“We give schools free equipment, and (their) wearing it and doing well . . . leads to the authenticity and credibility of the brand,” Vaccaro said.
He said a school “on full scholarship” would likely get about 50 pairs of shoes, 20 warmup suits and 20 travel bags plus T-shirts and socks, all worth about $5,000 to the school and costing Adidas about half that.
Critics of such deals contend they expose players to commercialism and send a bad message.
“Ideally, you’re not marketing your youngsters to move ahead, turning them into semipros before their time,” said John Quinn, head basketball coach at Fenwick High School in Oak Park. “You don’t want them to think there’s always a payoff for everything they do.”
Peters and Vaccaro respond to such criticism by saying that not all teams that receive free equipment are championship caliber and that teams that slip from the top are not automatically dropped from the equipment lists.
Warfield regards criticism of corporate involvement in schools to be largely a moot point. It’s inevitable, he says, so schools may as well cash in.
“Advertising is going to be in the schools, one way or another,” he said. “Shouldn’t we orchestrate it so schoolchildren get part of the money?
“If there’s something wrong with putting more non-tax money in schools, I wish somebody would point it out to me.”
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