May 23 2007
Attention Issaquah Schools Foundation: Here is how NOT to get a donation - Updated: apology added
My wife was sitting at home this evening, when the phone rang. It was a young man, calling from the Issaquah Schools Foundation who is having a phone-a-thon.
The call started nice, as he began his spiel for a donation. My wife knowing we were between checks tried to end the call quickly and not waste the kids time.
He thanked her and hung up. But before he did, he left her with this parting shot:
Thanks, but because of you kids are going to suffer.
My wife was stunned at the audacity and rudeness, so using her caller ID, she returned the call, and had a short discussion with the woman who answered.
The woman was properly shocked, as she should be.
I do not begrudge any group the need to raise money, though I admit the Issaquah School District and I have a long history of not seeing eye to eye about funding, spending and other matters stemming from a strike several years ago.
But I draw the line at rudeness and strong arm tactics. I draw the line at using unfair guilt.
Note to the child on the phone: Remember, you are cold calling my house, during my dinner time and soliciting money from my family, which puts you two strikes down in the rudeness department
Don’t make it a clean sweep and add insulting behavior..
Someone seriously needs some training, and they owe us an apology.
And I would advise not calling tomorrow.
Update:
I received this from the ISF:
Dear Karl,I am very grateful that you contacted us again so we could have the opportunity to apologize to your family! We were mortified to learn of the conversation one of our student callers had with your wife and because we do not know the number of incoming caller at our ISF office and she did not give her name, we were concerned we would be unable to contact you to apologize.We deeply regret and are sorry for the conversation your wife had with one of our callers on our behalf. We required training prior to the actual calls and could not believe one of our students would behave so ignorantly and irresponsibly. We repeatedly stressed polite phone etiquette during our training sessions and in their packet of materials. We had approximately 150 high school callers each night who made over 10,000 calls. Thankfully, yours was a relatively isolated incident (to the best of our knowledge).We had parent and coaches circulating constantly throughout the evening, looking for opportunities to reward good behavior and squelching bad behavior. We were unable to determine which student the call came from (or they would have been removed from phoning and severely reprimanded.) Although, once the employee at our office notified us of your wife’s call, we looked for a few possible offenders and began closely monitoring their calls.I deeply regret the incident and the consternation this caused you both. Now that we have your names, per your wife’s request, we will remove you from future calls of this sort. Be rest assured that we will again focus on appropriate telephone behavior in next year’s student training and this incident will provide an excellent illustration of how not to conduct yourself!If you would like to have any further discussion regarding this matter, please feel free to contact me at our office at 425-416-2045. Thank you again for bringing it to my attention so we could have the opportunity to apologize.Sincerely,Robin CallahanExecutive DirectorIssaquah Schools FoundationHelping Students Succeed| P.0. Box 835 | Issaquah, WA 98027 | 425.416.2045 | www.issaquahschoolsfoundation.org |
Apology Accepted.
In closing I am somewhat concerned overall about how schools will use students for activities like this. The kids asked to help in fund raising to sell cookies, pizzas, t-shirts, Gift packages and even one year, cookie dough.
They happily sign up to sell candy bars, coupon books, knick knacks and all manner of services. Car washes, Walk-a-thons, etc etc ad naseum.
The WEA and the unions even encourage the kids to walk the picket lines for their strikes.
The issue deteriorates into a debate about school funding, but funding is not the issue. The State and Federal spending, not to mention local contributions from levies is very high (even adjusting for inflation), so money is not the issue. I would submit that there are likely more issues involving spending then funding.
But that is a separate debate. My unhappiness is the manner in which our kids are gently turned into sales people for the schools to raise money. And increasing the funding may seem to make it unnecessary, but my cynicism doesn’t think so. The sales and fund raising for additional money would likely continue unabated.
Schools are there to teach our kids, and prepare them for life and their careers. But not just a career in fund raising.
5 Responses to “Attention Issaquah Schools Foundation: Here is how NOT to get a donation - Updated: apology added”
Leave a Reply
You can track future comments on this post via this RSS feed. You can trackback this post by pinging this URL.
Allowed HTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
someone call the WAAAAAmbulance
Anyone want to bet this is the kid who called my house?
LSU
I would have to disagree with you there, Karl. When a student comes to my door, fundraising for some event or fieldtrip, I happily donate. I think that student IS learning a valuable lesson: to go out and earn what he wants, rather than just ask his mom to write a check. While we all may or may not agree about whether the legislature is contributing enough to basic education and curriculum, we must all see the value of those students learning just how much that education costs, along with the lesson that his personal presentation will determine his success in sales or other endeavors.
I add my apology for the behavior of the student representing the ISF. We trained them, supervised them, gave them scripts to read and stressed courteousness in all things. He likely thought he was being witty, but has learned that doesn’t get good results.
Normally I do also, but I also recognize what is happening. The schools and organizations and all the groups that fund raise every year could just ask for donations, but they package it up in pretty little projects, and whole industries are now set up to take advantage of that.
I have, candidly, bought more useless stuff over the years for the sake of school fundraising then you can imagine. I feel very strongly that I have more then contributed my share to “the cause”, and up until recently I have done so willingly.
But I have to now recognize that using the kids to sell the stuff places an unfair obligation on relatives and friends because they know that sympathy and loyalty are an issue. It is not just schools, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts and countless other organizations do the same thing. It works and they know it will work, so they market to the kids, with the kids, for the kids. But the fact that it is effective does not mean I have to accept it as being right.
Is that really a lesson they need to learn? Honestly I hear this a lot in justification of the practices, but I cannot completely agree it is an appropriate lesson. And the notion that they work for it rather then just get mom to wrote a check is effectively falacious as well, because that is exactly what some parents do: They just write the check, or mom and dad take the fund raising stuff to work for the kids. If I could count how many times I have had parents passing the hat in some fashion for their kids….
The point here is that the kids are not as altruistically invested in every case as you would suggest, particularly since I know that some “fund raisers” also feature rewards for the kids who sell certain levels, so in those cases, there is now self interest at work as a primary motivator, not simply belief in a cause.
And I return to the point that it is not necessarily a lesson all kids need to learn “in school”. A part of my frustration with the education in our public schools is how so much of it is not focused on education, and this is yet another minor example of that distraction from a school’s primary purpose.
Has he? Has he learned anything? Since we could not identify him I have no clue whether he felt any remorse or suffered any consequence for his comment. And I do find it somewhat troubling that you would attempt to mitigate what he said by dismissing it as trying to be “witty”.
Witty? Making my wife feel bad for not having money is not witty. Using guilt and images of suffering kids is not witty, it emotional manipulation, and considering he did it as a parting shot, and immediately hung up, it was clearly meant to be malicious.
The mere suggestion that anyone could reasonably think this could have been attempted wit is insulting.
I accepted Robin’s apology this morning, publically on my blog.
I will accept yours as well, but I have to say that a part of me is tempted to reject your apology, as you seem to be more concerned with justification and rationalization then you are in apologizing for the actions of a member of your fund raising team.
Respectfully,
Karl Swenson
I’m a student at IHS, and I have to say this.
For the most part, none of us actually do fundraisers for the ‘good of the school.’ There’s incentive for us. Less money to pay at DECA (An Association of Marketing STudnets) conferences. Free Sonics tickets if we sell more then five entertainment books. A scholarship of about $250 if we sell the most candy bars.
What we’re learning isn’t going out there and earning money instead of asking mommy for a check. What we’re learning is how to bend people to the call of sympathy so we can obtain the golden trinket dangled in front of us, a tempting bait that has nothing to do with school patriosm.
And you would think, with all the fundraisers, the costs would be less. But in Issaquah, every day goes by when I, a middle class resident, feel a bit more then outcasted and ashamed because of the prices. Thirty dollars for this trip, twenty-five to take this class, fourty dollars for year book, thirty five for ASB… it goes on and on. And then you have the natural classroom fundraisers where other students ask you to donate money. But when you have to fork over all of your money to pay for several field trips and costs that shouldn’t be as high, you find yourself shamed because everyone is demanding why you haven’t just “$5″ or “$10″ or even “just $15″ for a basket for an auction.
The young man in this article is a prime example of the attitude Issaquah has. There are so many fundraisers, because they believe everyone has Microsoft or Verizon high-ranking employees.
I don’t believe students at my school or any school in a region like Issaquah is learning anything beyond that everyone has money and that by doing it, they get something for themselves. What a fundraiser should be teaching is working together, gathering money for a needed cause, and showing people the different economic levels. One person may buy a hundred dollars of merchandise from you. Another will be unable to give you anything. And those are the people you’re raising the money for.
That’s what the fundraisers should teach. Charity to those who aren’t as fortunate as you.
But they’re not.
All I see them teaching is everyone has money and that “[I'm] going to get a prize if I raise the most money.”
And of course, the classic “My family and neighbors will buy stuff if I look cute!”