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# Advertising rights given to companies
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/advertising-rights-given-to-companies/
- Published: 2004-01-07T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T03:28:01.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Education, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*SCHOOLS, from page 7 Marketing deals criticized*

Molnar, head of the Arizona State University's Commercialism in Education Research Unit, which studies corporate involvement in schools.

Niday, mother of two children, in the fourth and eighth grades, said “going to corporate sponsorship is a little sad.” But she insists her 2,700-student district in Scotts Valley has few other options after the community already rallied to raise $400,000 to mitigate additional cuts this school year, sparing some library aides, program supervisors and counselors.

The district so far has partnered with a construction company that will provide $14,000 and improvements at Scotts Valley's middle school, and a roofing firm that will give $5,000 and gardening boxes to several schools.

“The state funding process is broken, and to sit back and wait for it to be fixed is to do nothing for our children,” Niday said. “We have to look at different mechanisms for our funding,”

During the 1990s, the number of exclusive corporation-school marketing deals jumped 13-fold while the number of sponsored educational materials supplied by big business or trade groups grew 18-fold, according to a 2000 study by Molnar's group.

Meanwhile, the General Accounting Office in 2000 reported that just 19 states then had laws and regulations governing commercial activities in public schools.

The NSBA, representing about 15,000 school boards nationwide, believes lawmakers shouldn't meddle in what should be a local issue, Fuller said. That feeling was echoed by the National Soft Drink Association's Sean McBride, who said “local schools and parents decide what kind of food policy they have for each school.”

The deals can be lucrative for companies. Coca-Cola has contracts with at least 6,000 of the nation's more than 14,000 public school districts. Almost 99 percent of high schools, nearly 75 percent of middle schools and 43 percent of elementary schools have vending machines or snack shops, according to the CDC.

To Molnar, school districts chasing commercialism deals “have sort of lost themselves in a race to the bottom,” Molnar said. “Until the state and a school district erects a clear barrier and draws a bright line, the bad practices are going to drive out the good.”

But in Scotts Valley, florist Dennis Perry says savvy children already have been exposed to marketing “anyplace and everyplace.”

“As long as the upper hand is given to schools to dictate where the money's going and what's being advertised, I don't think it's a problem,” said Perry, the father of a third-grader. “You either embrace it and make it work in your favor or it passes you up.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 7, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/010704.pdf?ref=smdp.com)