Mother Can You Spare a Dime?

Candy bar, anyone?

M&Ms? Wrapping paper? Popcorn (What a deal! Only $10 a pound!) Coupon book? Car wash coupon? Aromatherapy Candle? Sponsor my kid to self-ambulate? I'm begging you…

I (uh, I mean my 7-year-old son) MUST sell all this stuff before next Tuesday, or his class will be summarily shot, and their organs harvested for sale on the black market to fund the new music department.

Okay, I exaggerate. It's not for the music department. It's to fix the water fountain. The music department fund drive doesn't start until Thursday.

Because of rampant budget cuts, or possibly subterranean radioactive termites, our school has been forced to rely more and more on creative sources of revenue for little niceties such as, oh, say, books. Their great idea now is to put the little ones to work. Starting at the ripe old age of five. (Maybe at age 8 they'll set 'em to building that new classroom!)

Well, good luck to them. They've never been all that useful around the house.

We have your three basic types of school fundraisers:

  • The aforementioned fundraisers for ordinary classroom items which the state won't pay for anymore, because who REALLY needs stuff like chalk when the politicians themselves are in dire short supply of important work-related items, such as perfectly transparent ice cubes and perpetual motion desk sculptures?

  • Charitable donations, and other Internet hoaxes.

  • Donations for class trips to places we parents can't even afford to visit.

Actually, all of the above fundraisers primarily boil down to: methods to enrich companies who take approximately 142% of the collected moneys, leaving to the school only a few meager checks that wander in when some of the older children randomly call parents, posing as collection agents for "misappropriated munchies." Or Prince Edward in a can.

To further explore this seedy world of child labor, there are four categories of saleable items:

1.   The useless item you will initially INTEND to use, but which ultimately end up in a landfill (see: wrapping paper, regional coupon books - to be conveniently stored in the OTHER car.)

2.   The redeemable labor coupon item that you will never use because your car will not start that day (see: the infamous car wash coupon, only redeemable during lightning storms.)

3.   The sponsorship, wherein your child will complete incredible feats of physical and mental stamina that in my generation fell under the category of "regular homework" and "walking over to Cindy's house."

4.   Blatant shameless requests for money.

In an ordinary taste test, four out of five parents prefer number four. Heck, I'd rather give the school the buck straight off than eat the candy bar, and pay Jenny Craig $100.

The smoke that makes all of this highway robbery salable, nay ATTRACTIVE is what I refer to as "prize prestidigitation." Sales-goals met garner valuable rewards! Yes, kiddies, you can win win win! T-shirts! Frisbees! Tickets to impossibly distant theme parks! Calculators! Luggage! Luggage? (I'm telling you, when a 7-year-old gets in his head that he needs luggage, there will be nothing short of a wayward Mack truck to derail him.)

But step back a second.

Since when should "collecting for charity" demand a bounty? I thought charity was a civic duty of the privileged. I thought charity was its own reward. I thought the check was in the mail and he would still respect me in the morning. ..

So effectively trained by this prize mentality, our children now approach the homeless and demand, "So, what do I get if I give you a dollar?"

In the spirit of  I hereby present the following completely new and novel ways for kids (and thus schools) to ilk us out of our spare change. And more. Okay, maybe they're not all completely original. But I might just get away with it in this current culture, which (did you know?) invented bell-bottom low-rise jeans.

Things I would give a kid $10 for:

  • Show up at my door and say, "Gee, Mrs. Kawa, you look nice today. Have you lost weight?"

  • Promise not to sell me stuff for a whole year.

  • Ring my doorbell the day after Halloween and trick-or-treat for ALL of the leftover candy. (Sell it on the secondary market, for all I care.)

  • Find and kill the spider who lives in my car.

  • Squeal on the kid who keeps swiping mailbox ornaments.

  • Offer up a hideous unidentifiable decoration made from natural items NOT plucked from my landscaped yard, which cost at least one hour of personal labor, and of which he/she is VERY proud.

  • A glass of REAL (icy) lemonade, brought to my car window while I wait 75th in line to pick up my kids from school, in Florida, in September, when my A/C is broken.

But in the mean time, I can't sit here yapping all day. I have candy bars to move. Are you going to buy one or not?

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© 2001, Susan Kawa, All rights reserved.