Parent life / Parent life · School book fairs
At This Book Fair, the Book Comes Before the Eraser
A Pennsylvania parent ran her school's Scholastic fair on one rule. That year's bestseller sold for $12.99, $7, $1 and nothing.
Megan Angelo took over the Scholastic Book Fair at her children's elementary school in Pennsylvania in 2022. In a piece for Romper, she described what she saw from behind the register: children hanging off to the side, children trying not to look at the books, children bringing things up and hearing no. The free box was offered. The free box did not have the Roblox gaming guide.
So she found a sponsor. A regional supermarket chain had just opened a store visible from the school's front door, and it agreed to put $1,000 into each fair. A banner went up. The bags were stamped, by hand, by her, in front of the TV.
Then the rule. For the first two days, classes came to shop, and every child had to leave with a book before buying anything else. If you brought $20 for a $14.99 book, you paid and got change. If you brought $5, the donated money covered the rest. If you brought nothing, it covered all of it. The line looked the same either way.
Some children did not love having to get a book first. Angelo admitted she understood. The smell of the gummy bear erasers, she wrote, "intoxicates me, too."
The eraser smells like gummy bears. The book smells like a book. This is not a fair fight, and a book fair is where it is held.
The top seller was Frizzy, a graphic novel by Claribel A. Ortega about a Dominican-American girl's hair, which had to be restocked twice. Three days after the fair closed it won the Pura Belpré Children's Author Award. Frizzy retails for $12.99. At her fair, she wrote, it also went for seven bucks, a dollar, "and zero dollars, zero cents." She estimated it took less than $80 in donations to get 20 children owning it.
Afterward, children with money could still buy sushi pens and fuzzy journals by the armful. But, she wrote, every child in the school came, and nobody left empty-handed. Students who had finished checking out sat on the linoleum and started reading while they waited.
The middle one, at seven, spent his entire book-fair money on a pen with a tiny fan in it. He used the fan twice. The youngest, this year, came home with a book and an eraser shaped like a strawberry. She has read the book three times. She has never used the eraser. She keeps it by her pillow and smells it before she goes to sleep, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the eraser's whole job.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Megan Angelo: a parent’s account of running an inclusive Scholastic book fair romper.com
- ALA: 2023 Pura Belpré award announcement ala.org
- Public parent and volunteer discussion: The book fair puts toys on the books, October 24 2023 reddit.com