One unconfirmed "fact" that Denise Bohman cited at the debate this week is that "I raised about $70,000 in books for our school in the past 14 years." Assuming that she is correct there are several ways to look at this, not all of them really that positive for our school.
How could this be? We all love reading and books. My daughter complains that I have too many books. She herself has her nose in books from morning until night and sometimes even later.
According to Scholastic's book fair web page, the school gets 40-60% of the sales to spend on books. If these fairs really brought in $70,000 then a simple calculation would show that around $140,000 has been drained out of our Valley community and into the bank accounts of a corporation with $50 million per year in sales. Keep in mind who runs the corporation including board Executive Vice President James W. Barge who also serves as Chief Financial Officer of Viacom Inc. which is the owner the such fine programming at MTV, Neopets, and VH1.
Denise's effort to sell our children books of doubtful academic or even entertainment value cannot compare to her vote in 2010 to cut our library instructional assistant position. What good are all those books she claims to have singlehandedly brought in for our school if there is no librarian to run the library? They do look pretty good on those shelves.
Also, while Denise has been giving her time to run the book fairs our local public library was shut down several years ago due to county budget cuts. Since the Fairfax library is shockingly closed on Fridays and Sundays Valley children and residents have virtually no library service for 2/3 of the weekend. Pt. Reyes is only open 4 hours during the weekend and Inverness for 6 hours. These are the meager library services across a distance of distance of 21.4 miles from Fairfax to Inverness.
Anybody who been in business knows that a 40-60% "rebate" on the retail price is really no rebate at all. This is really just a scam. If they really want to rebate what our children spend on their books they would give it on their cost not their mark-up. I put quotes around rebate because in reality this is nothing but a kickback for getting our kids in front of their limited product range. Our children are being led to these book fairs as a captive audience which is being taught to consume not to learn.
Lastly, take a look at the books offered at the fair. They are all brand new, overpriced, and the quality is fairly poor. Except for a decent selection of science oriented books there are books of doubtful "scholastic" quality offered. We own numerous scholastic books but these were published over many decades and acquired at pennies a used book. Most of the books they publish today are part of a vertical marketing strategy which tie the books to toys, movies, cartoons, video games (such as Neopets) and other commercial trash being marketed to children at younger and younger ages.
While Denise would have us admire her efforts to run the fair perhaps a more effective use of her time and efforts over the past dozen years would have been as a board member trying to make our local revenue tax stream more equitable and adequate. This could have included keeping our public library open and accessible to those children whose parents cannot afford to buy brand new books for their kids or even want to buy those from a limited range offered by a corporation. Afterall, this is a corporation whose bottom line is profiting from children with highly suspect products fronting as being of "scholastic" value.
We also know how libraries are more than just about warehousing books. They are a hub of community life and learning, an information access hub, and a gathering place used by people young and old. Denise let our library shut down on her (and Richard Sloan's) watch and they have done zero to bring it back.
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