Still, there are pockets of furtive dissent. "Many teachers are quietly opposed to the advertising," says Ed Bailey, a fifth-grade math teacher at Steele Elementary School. "We feel we are being forced into the position of telling students, 'We approve of Coke, we approve of Burger King; we, the school, approve of these products, so they must be good for you.'" Some teachers have taken to hiding ads they've been asked to post in hallways, Bailey says. Others, like John Hawk, a twenty-five-year veteran of Colorado Springs schools, uses them for lessons on propaganda in his social studies classes at Mitchell High School. "Students and teachers need basic training on how to deal with the corporate invasion of every aspect of life," Hawk says. "Schools used to be the one safe haven where kids weren't exposed to a constant barrage of advertising. Now even that's gone."

Yet few students at Mitchell or other area schools seem to know or care what schools used to be like. This doesn't surprise John Crockett, Susan Crockett's oldest child. "Commercials, ads, videos, that's all my generation has known," says Crockett. "The ads [at Doherty High School] are no big topic of hallway conversation, that's for sure. They just seem to fade into the background."

Meanwhile, District 11 is determined not only to attract more corporate sponsors but to spread the Colorado Springs model nationwide. "We get dozens of calls every day from school districts wanting to replicate what we've done," says Bob Moore. "Can they visit here? Can they talk to us? We say, 'Sure, we want to spread the word.'" Already, the Denver, Houston, Newark and Jefferson County, Colorado, school districts have set up soft-drink or marketing programs. Jefferson County even got Pepsi to kick in $1.5 million to help build a new sports stadium, and some county schools tested a new science course, developed in part by Pepsi, titled "The Carbonated Beverage Company," in which students taste-test colas, analyze cola samples, take a video tour of a Pepsi bottling plant and visit a local Pepsi plant.

In its publicity efforts, District 11 has its own high-powered corporate partner, Dan DeRose, an entrepreneur who has single-handedly invented a brand-new mini-industry: the school-marketing broker. DeRose is the founder and president of DD Marketing, a firm that specializes in putting together exclusive marketing contracts for public schools and colleges. DeRose brought not only Coke to District 11 but also US West--in the first exclusive partnership between a telecommunications company and a school district. (Sign up for phone service or call waiting with US West, and a commission is paid to one's school of choice.) But DeRose has bigger ambitions.

A 37-year-old former professional football player and college athletic director, DeRose is evangelical in his belief that advertising deals are good not only for schools and education but also help level an unfair playing field: "Schools have been opening their doors to corporate America for years," DeRose says, noting that many school districts cut their own marketing deals with big companies, only to wind up with "peanuts" in exchange. "Our philosophy is if you're going to allow corporate America into your schools, maximize your return."

DeRose claims that he and his staff have visited more than 800 school districts nationwide during the past year, of which about 150 have signed exclusive soft-drink contracts, while 600 more are in the negotiating stage. According to published accounts, DD Marketing gets a 25-40 percent cut of each deal. DeRose is known for his imaginative pitches to interested schools and companies. During negotiations for a $3.5 million, ten-year exclusive contract for the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District in Texas with Dr. Pepper/7-Up, some school board members expressed unease with having advertisements in classrooms. As an alternative, DeRose helped arrange for Dr. Pepper logos to be painted on the rooftops of two high schools that lie directly under the flight path for Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

Critics like Andrew Hagelshaw say the cash being paid out to schools isn't all that impressive. In Colorado Springs, for example, the annual school budget is $165 million. Broken down, the ten-year, $8.4 million Coke contract works out to be a payment of $840,000 per year, or 0.5 percent of the total yearly budget. "On a per pupil basis, that's nothing," says Hagelshaw. "They're selling their kids out cheap."

Indeed, while school officials claim that their main motivation for seeking corporate contracts is money, there is some evidence that in the long run the deals may undermine their ability to obtain more state funds and may reinforce classic financial distinctions between poor and wealthy school districts. Low-income school districts that are desperate for school supplies often are the first and most eager clients of companies that provide free equipment to schools, such as Channel One and ZapMe! [see "Zapped," in this issue]. The result: Poor schools get their ten or fifteen free televisions or computers (and the advertising that goes along with them), while district and state officials feel less motivated to provide the schools with adequate equipment or an in-school technology plan. Wealthier school districts often turn to corporate cash after being squeezed by local and state funding cutbacks, as was the case with both the Colorado Springs and Grapevine-Colleyville districts. The danger is that school administrators will become dependent on corporate handouts and forget that it was the failure to provide schools with adequate public funding that brought them to the begging bowl in the first place. As Colorado Springs social studies teacher John Hawk notes, "It says something about our country's social priorities when we have to resort to corporate contracts to fund our schools."

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