School Buses Now Roll With Ads

Advertisers nationwide are paying big bucks to turn school buses into rolling billboards. The trend pleases educators at cash-starved school districts but disgusts some consumer advocates.

School districts say they need the money, but critics say these advertising messages are the last things youngsters need. The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith spoke to representatives on both sides.

Colorado Spring's School District 11 started selling ads on their school buses in 1993 out of pure desperation for dough at a time when pushing through a local tax increase proved impossible. Elaine Naleski, director of communications for the district, says community leaders told school officials, "You need to find some alternative funding methods to fund the schools. You're not going to get a tax increase. Be entrepreneurial."

This year, the district will collect about $650,000 for a contract that combines the bus advertisements and Coca-Cola vending. And, Naleski says, "taxpayers appreciate it."
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But Gary Ruskin, executive director of the consumer group Commercial Alert, calls advertising on school buses "commercial exploitation of vulnerable, impressionable schoolchildren. We send them to school to read and write and add and think, not to clobber them with advertising." He predicts that the companies who want to reach school children with advertising inevitably are those selling "junk food and soda pop."

Commercial Alert!

Funny how fiction becomes reality...

(well, it wasn't ads on busses, it was product placement used AS education ((e.g. "5 bottles of coke + 6 bottles of coke = how many bottles of coke?)) - the only thing that could be worse than ads on busses.)

and increase spending on guns and bombs instead of books and pencils.

but please no soda or candy ads. The school board should approve all the ads.

why not?

The idea is to deliver what was public into private hands, but make the people think it's still their world. Soft drinks and tennis shoes are lots more fun than voting and taxes, anyways.

I remember when that farce was unveiled: free TVs for the classroom in exchange to show Channel One everyday. Channel One was suppose to have several minutes of "news" for current-events discussion (enlightening the kids), but also several minutes of ads.

Channel One was nothing than an ad machine disguised as "informative news."

And now with the complete corporate takeover of the media, Channel One would no doubt advance the neo-Con fascist agenda and, at the same time, push products to a captive audience.

A "win-win" for corporations, all in the name of "helping" budget-strapped schools!

:puke:

it doesn't surprise me. In the district I drive for it has "farmed out" the busing to a private company so at least we don't have the advertising yet.

I'll be putting up a fight against this in our district, thanks for the heads-up!

This doesnt surprise me much because the privitiser crew is in power. They also wanna drill in anwr. Nothing is beyond the wants of corporations and the GOP that whores for them.

:evilgrin:

No bike lanes, no sidewalks, hills and curves. And school is about ten miles away for many.