Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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Rob
Sherman Advocacy
Click on either picture for larger image and picture description.
"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
The Village of Buffalo Grove, Illinois, has a moving message signboard near the entrance to village hall. The signboard was paid for by the taxpayers so that the village could inform residents of secular public events, but last week, advertisements for parochial schools were being displayed on the marquee. Rob Sherman Advocacy asked the village to remove the sectarian advertising immediately and to review the constitutionality of using public property for this purpose.
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Late winter and early spring is school sign-up season. In February and March, parents are asked to sign their kids up for the coming school year so that schools know how many students to plan for in the coming academic year. There is intense competition between public and parochial schools to attract students, so no trick is left untried by parochial schools to get their message out at taxpayer expense.
The Village of Buffalo Grove is my home town. It is located twenty-five miles northwest of downtown Chicago. Last Monday, as I drove past village hall, I noticed an advertisement for two different religious organizations being displayed from the village hall marquee. In the following pictures, the marquee is in the foreground and village hall is the building in the background.
One set of ads was for a Jewish pre-school:
The other set of ads was a more sneaky. It promoted a purportedly secular event, "Celebrate Kids Day," at a church.
The real purpose of the event, however, is not to inform kids about safety by having public agencies put on safety demonstrations outside in the dead of winter. Rather, the real purpose of Celebrate Kids Day is to use public agencies to attract an audience to the church to see the church's advertisements for their parochial school program. Evidence of that can be seen if you drove by the church any time in the past week. There aren't any signs promoting the so-called Celebrate Kids Day, but there sure is a sign that promotes their parochial school:
That's the church on the left. The brown sign on the right says, "Kingswood United Methodist Church." That white sign in the middle doesn't say anything about Celebrate Kids Day. Rather, it says, on the lower portion of the sign, "Kingswood Preschool" with the phone number below it. The orange portion at the top of that sign says, "Enroll now."
Many radio stations use a similar technique of exploiting the issue of safety as a cynical gimmick for generating advertising revenue. Having been in the radio business for twenty years, I could smell the church's scam a mile away. When radio stations do it, it's called a "Safety." What happens is, the radio station will invite area businesses to sponsor the cost of airing a PSA (public service announcement), something to the effect of, "Drivers, spring is just around the corner. Watch out for kids on bicycles and kids darting out from between parked cars. This message is brought to you by [Company Name], which is concerned about the safety of our kids."
Radio stations recruit companies to pay to have their company name included in the PSA's. The radio stations really don't give a damn about the safety of kids. The Safeties are just a sales gimmick that local radio stations use to sell excess capacity of advertising time. It's all just ad revenue to the radio station. They could care less what the spot says, as long as it brings in money. Radio station management doesn't cares if the safety of kids is enhanced by the spots. They just care about how much money they can bring in by airing Safeties. They just want the ad revenue, and they're willing to pretend that they care about kid safety in order to generate additional ad revenue. Even though you know me as a staunch advocate for safety, especially the safety of kids, I've never been willing to sell radio station Safeties because the stations were merely using safety as a scam for generating ad revenue, the same way that Kingswood U.M. Church is today trying to generate revenue for their sectarian school through the indirect means of holding a Safety of their own.
Kingswood Church is not putting on the Celebrate Kids Day today out of concern for kids' safety. Last weekend, ten inches of snow fell in the Chicago area. The temperature in Buffalo Grove five days ago was six degrees below zero. If this event was really about safety, Kingswood would run the event in the summer, when kids could get outside and see the fire engines and police cars and other exhibits that could be put on display. By holding the event in the dead of winter but during the heart of parochial school sign-up season, Kingswood demonstrates that Celebrate Kids Day is a product of their parochial school marketing department, not an event that really has the safety of kids at heart.
When I saw the overt and covert advertisements for the parochial schools on the village hall marquee last Monday morning, I contacted the village manager and also the village president (mayor). They both agreed to meet with me that same morning.
On Monday, I'll tell you the results of that meeting and what action was taken with respect to the advertisements for parochial schools that appeared on the village marquee.
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Rob Sherman P. O. Box
7410
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-7410
A post office box is used
because
the street address uses a curb mail box,
which is not secure.
Telephone: (847) 870-0700
Fax: (847) 870-1156
E-mail: rob followed by the at symbol followed by robsherman dot com