We Are Only Volunteers

My apologies to my regular readers. I know I’ve been a little AWOL this past week. I spent most of it dedicating my time to a book sale at one of my kids’ schools. Remember the book fair last fall? Well…this event was markedly different from that one.

For decades, our PTO has run the fair in the fall. We have dozens of volunteers and even make a floor plan for the set up. We buy funky decorations and just go all out. In some years, the co-chairs have even served passed hors d’oeuvres for the teachers during their special preview day. We toned that down a bit, but still…we make a ton of money, have a lot of fun and, most important of all, we get books (thousands of them!) in the hands of kids and their teachers.

But last week’s shindig was supposed to be different. Not as big, not as much planning, not as many volunteers.

Basically, we were under the impression that it would be a low key, simple deal where we just open up about seven or eight cases of books and have one table set up for payment.

But when the company rep called to confirm delivery of the fair items, she started listing off three times as many cases, dozens of boxes of more books (which we were supposed to arrange on tables) and all sorts of tchotchke garbage (pens with feathers, autograph books, monkey erasers, etc.).

I felt misled, deceived and angry.

I’ll spare you the boring details, but the bottom line is that we managed to get them to pull back a good deal of the inventory. We still had to beg other parents to help us man the check out table and provide goodies for the teachers.

I asked some of the teachers for feedback. Did they get bargains? Did they appreciate having another book fair at this time of year? What were the students saying about it? They told me that it was a bad time of year - teachers were in the midst of one of their busiest weeks, with state testing going on at the same time. But generally, they love books and are happy to have a book fair whenever we can do it.

I accept responsibility for the bad timing - I should have been more careful when choosing the dates. That’s not my gripe.

Here’s the problem most of the parents had - the school gets no profit. Whatsoever. It’s a buy one get one free fair, so the company stresses the fact that we get savings from the very nature of the fair. And that’s it.

We work our butts off and pay for food, coffee, treats, sustenance for our volunteers, supplies to run the event (staplers, tape, posters, post-it notes, etc.) out of our own pockets. We rationalize it all by telling ourselves that it’s for the good of the children, the teachers, and the community overall, but it seems (to many people within the school) that the entity with the most to gain is the book company.

So…then…we couldn’t help but wonder … why don’t they staff the sale? Take it out of their overhead budget instead of our school volunteers.

They know we’re passionate about books and are all pretty obsessive about these fairs and doing whatever we can to get kids reading more books.

Maybe I’m just tired and cranky after a long week …

Tell me - what do you think? Were we taken advantage of? Or is it just not at all a big deal? Would you have spent 10 hours a day for five days at a book fair like this - knowing that the school would not receive any part of the profits?