Alternative To Scholastic Book Fair?

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Trying to help our K to 8 Catholic school find a suitable alternative to Scholastic Book Fair. The fair brings in around $2,000 per year to the school. The school is reluctant to give it up, but the books offered by Scholastic are often contrary to church teachings, and occasionally anti-Catholic.

The school already does JClub which offers only Catholic books, and is not comparable to Scholastic in terms of income generation or book selection. The librarian does not have time or the resources to review the thousands of Scholastic books to pick out the bad ones.

If there is a Catholic, or even Christian, book company out there which runs a program like Scholastic Book Fair with a wide offering of children’s literature suitable for Catholic students, this would be great. If you know of anything we can look into please let me know?
 
I’m curious to what the anti-catholic ones are? Or even the contrary to Catholic teaching ones?
 
Do you have any catholic bookstores nearby that could do a fair?

And I’ve never known scholastic to have anti catholic books…
 
Razanir said:
I agree. Admittedly I haven’t been to one since eighth grade (freshman in college), but I don’t remember any that were immoral and especially not anti-Catholic
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They definitely have iffy stuff in the book order catalogs, but it’s always marked with a “mature content” warning- and “mature”, in this case, just means it’s not for 8 year olds. I don’t remember the actual fairs very much, but they were better than what I saw in other places.

I wouldn’t cancel it just because I love books, but then I’m not in this situation. 🤷
 
Thank you. I’ll forward the links to the librarian.
Morwenna said:
I’ve seen Ignatius Book & Film Fairs at Parishes, so why not at schools? 🙂

About the fairs: ignatius.com/promotions/Book_Film_Fair/

Children & Teen books: ignatius.com/Products/CategoryCenter/213/TeensChildren.aspx

Children’s Films: ignatius.com/Products/CategoryCenter/165/Children.aspx

There are other books & films in the non-children’s categories that would be appropriate for family reading/viewing, too!
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Dandelion_Wine said:
I’m curious to what the anti-catholic ones are? Or even the contrary to Catholic teaching ones?
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I can’t say specifically as I’m trying to help out, but I’m not directly involved. I know both the librarian and the principal have issues with Scholastic’s book offerings as it relates to appropriateness in a Catholic school.

There’s a lot of information available on anti-Catholic literature. I recall a book series called Golden Compass which was heavily promoted by Scholastic and had anti-Catholic themes. I had a school aged son when the movie came out. He was in a government school. He actually purchased the book through Scholastic before I became aware. I read the book and the anti-Catholic messaging was so blatant I threw the book away. That incident made me sensitive to the fact that Scholastic has very different values than many Catholic families.

The point of the question is to find a book fair where a Catholic school doesn’t need to dedicate valuable resources to reviewing every book for inappropriate content. Nothing is perfect, but parents spending the money to send their kids to Catholic schools expect to get some measure of protection from the secular and anti-Catholic narratives advanced by many these days. Surely that narrative should not be brought into the schools if there are other options available.
 
jediliz said:
Do you have any catholic bookstores nearby that could do a fair?

And I’ve never known scholastic to have anti catholic books…
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Not looking for Catholic books. JClub provides those books.

Looking for a book fair where the value judgments are more in line with Catholic values than secular values. So, for instance, the secular world may find sexual themes to be appropriate for a 6th grader, while those themes may not be deemed appropriate by Catholics.

Also when there are authors and books with a known anti-Catholic message, Scholastic isn’t looking out for Catholics and Christians, but perhaps there is a book fair company out there which does keep Catholics and Christians in mind when putting books on the list.
 
Checking out alternatives to Scholastic Book Fair, but not finding what they are looking for. This isn’t about eliminating mainstream books and replacing them with Catholic books. Frankly they do that already with JClub, and they don’t sell nearly as many books as they do with Scholastic.

What they need is a book fair that filters out the books with anti-Catholic themes and values, but still offers the majority of mainstream books that don’t contradict Catholic values.
 
Hi There,

We are a homeschool family that filters books and resources that we buy/rent from the library. Scholastic is known in some homeschool circles as selling books that are against Catholic teaching and morals. There is a lot of inflitration of new age as a previous post stated. It is very hard to discern and I highly recommend this book for anyone that is in charge of buying/renting books:

emmanuelbooks.com/product_detail.cfm/ID/425/OID//A-Landscape-With-Dragons/

Also,

Amazon & Barnes & Noble are one of the top supporters of the Liberal Gay/Lesbian agenda.

for alternative resources look at

www.betterworldbooks.com, www.abebooks.com, parishwebstore.com, there is also a protestant resource that we use called. www.rainbowresource.com

Blessings,

C
 
Look, it’s a secular book company. They’re going to sell books that appeal to the general public, including people that are not Catholic, or are of no faith whatsoever. It’s not their job to censor themselves. I used to love ordering books from the Scholastic forms. If I remember correctly, the order form is only three or four pages long. Wouldn’t a smarter idea be to simply provide a list of reviews from the Catholic point of view to each parent before the book orders are sent home? That way, each parent can make their own decisions. It would NOT take much effort to do so.
 
Cath4life said:
correction: Unfortunately, I just found out that abebooks.com is a subsidiary of amazon 😦 Ignore that recommendation.
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Okay. I forwarded the links, but feedback so far is the schools need a book company that operates book fairs, not just offers books.

So the way it works is that Scholastic sends posters advertising the book fair, they provide cardboard shelving for displaying the books, they supply books (Scholastic picks the books) based on age, and the school sells the books that come in at a fair. The fair goes for 3 days. The first day the kids get a “sneak peek” walk through. They cant’ buy then. Over the next two days they come in class by class to purchase the books. The school sends back whatever books don’t get purchased.

The school can either take a cash payment of 25% of sales or they get 50% if they take books instead of cash. The Catholic school I’m asking about takes the 25% cash. They typically make $2000.

So if there are book companies out there that run a similar program where they pick the books (appropriate for Catholic school children) and send fair supplies (posters and cardboard shelving) and the school receives a 25% payment of the total receipts, then this would be a company that could replace Scholastic.

Again, the issue is that some of the books Scholastic chooses to send contradict Catholic values and teachings. It isn’t every book. It’s probably not even most books, but it would be better to have a fair which generates similar income, but with less chance of inappropriate content.
 
SimJim said:
Okay. I forwarded the links, but feedback so far is the schools need a book company that operates book fairs, not just offers books.

So the way it works is that Scholastic sends posters advertising the book fair, they provide cardboard shelving for displaying the books, they supply books (Scholastic picks the books) based on age, and the school sells the books that come in at a fair. The fair goes for 3 days. The first day the kids get a “sneak peek” walk through. They cant’ buy then. Over the next two days they come in class by class to purchase the books. The school sends back whatever books don’t get purchased.

The school can either take a cash payment of 25% of sales or they get 50% if they take books instead of cash. The Catholic school I’m asking about takes the 25% cash. They typically make $2000.

So if there are book companies out there that run a similar program where they pick the books (appropriate for Catholic school children) and send fair supplies (posters and cardboard shelving) and the school receives a 25% payment of the total receipts, then this would be a company that could replace Scholastic.

Again, the issue is that some of the books Scholastic chooses to send contradict Catholic values and teachings. It isn’t every book. It’s probably not even most books, but it would be better to have a fair which generates similar income, but with less chance of inappropriate content.
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As a previous poster mentioned, Ignatius Press is the only Catholic Publisher I know of that does anything like that (though I don’t know the specifics of how it works and/or how much the school might earn). But of course – as with Scholastic – all the books they are offering are their own. Ignatius isn’t going to have any secular, mainstream titles.

I hope someone has an easy, quick solution. I’d be very interested to hear about it. I do not know of any shortcut other than attempting to filter the books yourself – which is going to be incredibly time consuming.

I am sure yours is not the only Catholic school that offers these fairs. Perhaps a letter to Scholastic would be in order, telling them that you enjoy their book fair but feel compelled to pursue other avenues because they are not doing an adequate job of filtering titles to be in accordance with the Catholic mission of your school. If enough people lodge such a complaint (and even stop supporting them as a result) then maybe that will encourage them to get someone on it. It’s not an unreasonable request and there are many, many Catholic schools out there. I would think it would be well worth their time to invest in doing so.
 
Rolltide said:
Look, it’s a secular book company. They’re going to sell books that appeal to the general public, including people that are not Catholic, or are of no faith whatsoever. It’s not their job to censor themselves. I used to love ordering books from the Scholastic forms. If I remember correctly, the order form is only three or four pages long. Wouldn’t a smarter idea be to simply provide a list of reviews from the Catholic point of view to each parent before the book orders are sent home? That way, each parent can make their own decisions. It would NOT take much effort to do so.
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From what I’ve been told Scholastic picks the books. They do have an on-line option that can go along with the book fair, but for the book fair they make the choices what to send. The librarian can influence how many for each age range, but not specific book selection. I would think a business would adapt themselves to the customers’ requirements, but they don’t so the school would like to explore other options.

Perhaps there are no other options which is why Scholastic can be less flexible with customers? The book fair seems to be the key component. I have a vague recollection of book fairs when I was a kid. The excitement of buying a book or two. Picking it out yourself from a selection you can touch and feel. That appeals to the kids and helps with sales.

You can go on Amazon to pick books…you don’t need school or Scholastic, but to get the book fair professionally done Scholastic may be the only player.
 
Joe_5859 said:
I am sure yours is not the only Catholic school that offers these fairs. Perhaps a letter to Scholastic would be in order, telling them that you enjoy their book fair but feel compelled to pursue other avenues because they are not doing an adequate job of filtering titles to be in accordance with the Catholic mission of your school. If enough people lodge such a complaint (and even stop supporting them as a result) then maybe that will encourage them to get someone on it. It’s not an unreasonable request and there are many, many Catholic schools out there. I would think it would be well worth their time to invest in doing so.
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Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me either, but in researching alternatives on the internet I’ve found the Scholastic problem with Catholic schools going back as far as 2004. As it appears they have little (if any) competition they have the upper hand. I know our Catholic school can’t easily walk away from $2000.
 
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