October 18, 2004
Reading, Writing and Corporate Sponsorships
By BILL PENNINGTON

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BROOKLAWN, N.J. - For 75 years, children in tiny blue-collar Brooklawn have attended the Alice Costello Elementary School, a simple brick building so central to the town that the morning bell can beseech a majority of students to begin their walk in from surrounding neighborhoods. If the scene is something out of the 1950's, then the seven-foot illuminated sign affixed to the outside of the school gymnasium is a clarion call to modern times.

It reads "ShopRite of Brooklawn Center," and it is a $100,000 advertisement. Three years ago, mimicking professional and collegiate sports teams that routinely sell naming rights to stadiums and arenas, the Alice Costello School became what is widely considered the nation's first elementary, middle or high school to sell naming rights for its gym to a corporate sponsor. Similar deals, worth millions of dollars, are being made around the country with companies as large as Nike and as small as a tire shop. Everything from gyms to ticket stubs seems to have a price.

"It's the wave of the future," Bruce Darrow, president of the Brooklawn school board, said. "I'm looking into selling advertising on the children's basketball uniforms."

Brooklawn, which is just south of Camden, has a price list and is waiting for more buyers: $5,000 to sponsor the jump circle at the center of the gym floor; $2,500 for advertising near the baseline; $500 for a banner on the wall.

"Twenty-five years from now, when this is widespread and accepted, people will say it all started here," Dr. John Kellmayer, the school district superintendent, said. "I'm fine with that. I wish we had started earlier and done more of it."

Brooklawn, with a population of about 2,000, appears to be slightly ahead of the curve and may have let ShopRite, which will pay for the $100,000 sign over 20 years, off lightly.

In the last two years, high schools in three Texas towns, Forney, Tyler and Midland, have each sold the naming rights to their football stadiums for more than a million dollars. The sponsors were a bank, a health care provider and a communications company. In Miramar, Fla., a donation of $500,000 will soon yield the Eastern Financial Florida Credit Union Stadium at Everglades High School. A pledge of $100,000 ensured that crowds headed for games at Vernon Hills High outside Chicago will be watching them at Rust-Oleum Field.

The spread of commercial interests in high school athletics is not limited to naming rights. Advertising is appearing increasingly on tickets to high school sports events, scoreboards, billboards in end zones, gym walls, locker rooms and the buses carrying teams to games. All three senior high schools in Plano, Tex., have corporate sponsors for each of their home games, along the lines of college football's Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. In this case, it is officially the Golden Chick Plano East vs. Garland game, with the local Golden Chick restaurant receiving promotional opportunities throughout the game.

"Corporate involvement at the high school level is about to explode nationwide," said Judith Thomas, the marketing director for the National Federation of State High School Associations. "It's an unlimited, untapped market and it is in places companies often can't easily reach. But on any given Friday night, in all those middle-American flyover states, sitting in high school football stadiums are millions of people."

School districts are simply following the lead of the rapid escalation of commercialism at major college and professional arenas and stadiums. More than $4 billion is currently being invested in naming rights alone at the college and pro level, according to the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

"Companies desperately want to get into high schools, because they know they are getting a captive audience with disposable income that is about to make decisions of lifelong preference, like Coke versus Pepsi," said David Carter of the Sports Marketing Group, a California company. "So the commercialism is coming to a school near you: the high school cheerleaders will be brought to you by Gatorade, and the football team will be presented by Outback."

Corporate sponsorships in high school athletics are a subset of the broader trend of commercialism permeating all facets of public education, be it beverage-company vending machines in school hallways or fast-food companies in cafeterias. It has fostered a backlash, and the opposition is particularly riled, because the apparent model for the future - the typical professional stadium awash in ads and slogans - is so omnipresent.

"But high schools are not pro stadiums, so it's pathetic to have a Rust-Oleum Field at a public, taxpayer-funded institution," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a watchdog organization based in Portland, Ore., which works to restrain commercialism. "Schools exist to teach children to read, write, add and think, not to shop. So what are we teaching them with big corporate ads on civic institutions?"

Alex Molnar, a professor of education policy and the director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University, says he believes that the advancing commercialism in public education is a violation of a public trust, and that school leaders have a responsibility to protect impressionable school-age children.

"We have an enormous problem in this country with overweight kids, who have poor diets lacking nutrition, and that contributes to the early onset of diabetes as well," he said. "So how is a school district helping that problem by selling Pepsi ads all over the football stadium scoreboard? Why don't they just let Jack Daniels advertise on it, too?"

School officials uniformly dismiss the suggestion that they would ever consider advertising from alcohol or tobacco companies, or from casinos.

"We're not going to cut a deal where it's the Alice Costello School sponsored by Playboy magazine," Mr. Darrow, the Brooklawn school board president, said.

The debate could grow thorny when it comes to identifying just where the line should be drawn, but public opinion seems to be shaped by whether the local school budget has been slashed, and, if so, how severely.

In Plano, where high school students are required to pay $100 a year to participate in school athletics, the school district has hired a full-time marketing director, whose goal is to raise $1.9 million a year so the athletic department can be self-sufficient. In this environment, a sign advertising Krispy Kreme donuts near the end zone of the football stadium causes no controversy, Plano's marketing chief, Chris Feris, said.

"Our parents are appreciative," he said, "because they know the alternative might be to drop some sports teams altogether or raise the fee to play."

In Southern California, which is another prominent school-budget battleground, the regional high school basketball championships are officially the Toyota basketball championships, thanks to $165,000 from the company.

The high school football championship in San Joaquin County in California has become the San Joaquin Section/Les Schwab Tires Division I Championship because of a $183,000 donation from the store.

Near San Diego, the Sweetwater Union High School District has sponsorship contracts with Nike, Pepsi, Pep Boys, a local pizza outlet and nearly 300 other businesses. The district recently created freshman teams at 12 high schools and initiated intramural sports at 12 middle schools.

Dr. Kellmayer, the Brooklawn superintendent, who has participated in the debate the longest, said there was no turning back.

"The public monopoly on public education is being broken apart," he said, adding: "I understand it's a slippery slope. But we need the revenue. People say we went too far with our gym sign and I say: 'Look, we did not even have a gym. Is it better to not have a gym at all, or is it better that we have one with a ShopRite sign on it?' ''

The growth in corporate sponsorships has given rise to another partnership that makes some high school officials uneasy. With corporate backing, there may soon be new national championships for high school athletes, especially in sports like track and field, golf, tennis, swimming or wrestling. In fact, the Nike Team Nationals in December will be the first national cross-country championships for high school teams. Nike has teamed with USA Track & Field for the event, but because most state high school associations forbid athletes from representing their high schools as a team beyond state championships, those competing in the Nike Team Nationals will actually have to compete on what are being called high school "club teams."

While many high school officials say they deplore the notion of a national championship, others want the national federation of high schools to create its own series of championships before all the corporate money goes to organizations outside the established high school umbrella.

The sponsorship dollars, coupled with the cable television rights, would could be worth many millions. What would ESPN pay for a 50-team national high school basketball championship tournament?

"Our membership is split on the issue," said Bob Gardner, the chief operating officer of the National Federation of State High School Associations. "A majority opposes it."

Rob Aldinger, a spokesman for Nike, said the company was sponsoring a national cross-country championship simply to give young runners another platform on which to compete. Nike is also in the process of refurbishing dozens of public playing fields across the country. In return, as it did when it renovated a city soccer field in Chicago in September, Nike permanently embedded its corporate logo, the swoosh, in the artificial turf of the field.

"It's just recognition for the donation to the community we made," Aldinger said.

On a recent afternoon in Brooklawn, next to the brick building that is a sort of pioneer in a budding national movement, 8-year-old Austin Darrow was among hundreds of students standing in the sun after school was dismissed. Austin, the son of the school board president, was asked if he knew the official name of the school gym.

He did not.

When his 14-year-old brother, Brett, was asked the same question, he immediately responded, "ShopRite of Brooklawn Center."

Ten minutes later, the Darrow brothers tossed a basketball back and forth as they walked across the grass outside the school. Asked where they were headed, they pointed toward the brick building and the seven-foot, $100,000 illuminated sign.

"The gym," they said.