WHY I TEACH-Part 22: Ah…The Sweet Things In Life

I stood in the grocery store checkout line later that day, my mind still reeling from Mr. Myers’ betrayal. As my head hung low, I noticed bright yellow tags on the candy bars—4 for $1.00.

“Wait, are those candy bars on sale for $.25 each?” I asked the cashier.

She looked at the yellow sales tag and nodded.

“Is there a limit to how many I can buy?”

She shook her head.

I did some quick mental math and realized I could buy 800 candy bars for $200, sell them for $1.00 each and make $600.

“I’m going to buy a bunch of these,” I warned the cashier, “and I have a tax-exempt card.” As I started pulling boxes off the shelf, I calculated I’d need 34 boxes with 24 candy bars in each to reach my 800. I went to the other aisles and grabbed more boxes. I heard the “beep, beep, beep” of the scanner.

“Can’t you ring them up in bulk?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to do that,” she replied.

“But I’m buying over 800 of them.”

She just shrugged and continued to scan one at a time. In the end, the receipt was over six feet long.

I stopped at the party store and purchased a dozen colorful cardboard boxes with handles. Each box could hold 25 candy bars.

When I got home, I sent an email to all my FBLA students informing them of a mandatory meeting the morning of the first day of school and placed an announcement on the school’s activity website.

As it was the first meeting of the year, in the morning, on the first day of school, and on a Monday, I wasn’t sure how many kids would show up. I was pleasantly surprised when all of my old members and seven more kids showed up, five of them girls.

“Well, this year we can’t work at the stadium,” I began.

“Wait, why?” Terrance asked.

“Because Myers is a dick,” I wanted to say but said, “And because of an accounting error, all of the money we earned last year is gone.”

“You’re joking, right?” Terrance asked. “We had like three grand in there.”

I bit my tongue and said, “So who likes candy bars?”

Throughout the day, FBLA members who wanted to sell candy bars returned to fill their candy boxes. At the end of the day when the kids brought back their boxes and unsold candy bars, I had a stack of $743.37. The $.37 didn’t make sense, but hey, they weren’t short any money.

I returned to the grocery store and purchased $200 worth of candy bars, then I drove across town to another grocery store and purchased $343 worth of candy bars. I stopped by the bank and deposited my original investment.

I also asked the managers if they could do a bulk order of 3,500 candy bars at the sale price. Astonishingly, they agreed. And just like that, FBLA had enough money to fund our first event.

The email notification on my desktop came as no surprise. I walked slowly to Mr. Myers’ office with a stack of papers in my hands. Mrs. Orian gave me a weird sort of look that I could only interpret to mean “Oh boy, are you in trouble.”

Mr. Myers looked up from his computer. “It has come to my attention that you are selling candy.”

“Nope, I am not,” I replied.

He got a bit flustered at that. “Your students are selling candy.”

“Correct, as an approved fundraiser.” I handed him the approved fundraiser sheet he had signed last year.

He got a bit more flustered and snatched the paper out of my hands. He stared at it hard.

“It doesn't have an expiration date,” I offered. “And I’ve filed it with the county board of education office.”

“Fine,” Mr. Myers set the paper down on his desk. I reached out for it and he put his hand on top of it.

“Oh, that’s OK, you can keep it. I’ve made 15 copies of it.” I smiled sweetly and turned and walked out of his office.

I handed the secretary, Mrs. Orian, a copy as I passed by her desk. “Just in case you were wondering,” I said.

I stopped by the faculty mailboxes and slipped a copy into the devil’s mailbox and hung up a flyer advertising our FBLA Candy Sale Fundraiser.