Yup, it's that time of year again. We're having our fall book fair to coincide with parent/teacher conference week. One little girl was so excited, she said, "I've been waiting for this for my whole life!"
The guy delivered the cases earlier in the week. It's literally double the size of stuff from my old school. And this time I have plenty of help. Before it was just me and the the clerk and maybe one volunteer once in a while. Now I'm clerkless, but there's a whole wing of the PTA for this kind of thing. They've set up a snack bar in the conference room and a website to sign up for register shifts and they write me little notes recommending restocks and the like. It's been going swimmingly.
The only bit of friction has come from my differing attitude towards the book fair than the previous Media Specialist. She was one of those who didn't love all the "stuff" that comes with a Scholastic book fair. The posters and markers and erasers and book marks and, well, basically toys. She pushed them to buy books. She didn't even display the posters. To her it was a book fair.
To me it's a book fair in terms of me being able to buy more books from the proceeds of this fund raiser. So we could be doing car washes or bake sales for all I care. I just want more money to buy books. Yes, I wish they would all buy books and I point out good books and help them with that. Also, if a student has some money with a list of books from Mom, of course I'm going to help them respect the wishes of their parents and have them get the things on the list rather than getting a chocolate-smelling calculator or whatever. (Yes, that's a real thing we sell.) But if a kid comes in with money and no list, I let them get whatever they want. This is America. We're capitalists. We can buy as much Made In China plastic crap as we can afford.
It hasn't caused a lot of friction. It's just a new idea for some of the folks used to the old way. Oh, and by displaying the posters? We've sold a ton of them. Especially the Minecraft one.
