February 17th, 2012
Seeking Money, Texas Schools Turn to Advertisements
By Morgan Smith
The New York Times
The rooftop of a suburban high school is not a location that companies usually consider prime advertising real estate. But in Humble Independent School District, it may be. The district’s high school lies directly in a flight path for Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
Although the rooftop plan has yet to come to fruition, Humble I.S.D. has already sold the naming rights to nearly every piece of its football stadium, including the entryway, the press box and the turf. Its school buses carry advertisements for the Houston Astros and local hospitals, among others.
The school district is pioneering a practice that an increasing number of districts across the state are adopting: selling advertisements on pieces of school property to help make up for some of the money lost through state budget cuts.
Texas schools’ success with advertising has varied, but the districts may not be getting as much cash out of the advertising as they might hope.
A report from Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, examined the advertising programs in the country’s 25 largest school districts, including Houston, Dallas and Cypress-Fairbanks in Texas. The group found that the revenue raised from advertising in those three districts in 2012 made up a fraction of 1 percent of the overall budgets.
Read more: http://nyti.ms/xJDzRM