By Jessica Easthope
Students from more than 50 schools across the Diocese of Brooklyn are becoming newspaper boys and girls. Starting March 15 they’re competing to sell the most new subscriptions or renewals to The Tablet, the Diocese of Brooklyn’s paper.
Vito Formica, the Executive Director of News and Development at DeSales Media Group, the non-profit running the fundraiser, says the incentives are big.
“We have covered how difficult the pandemic has been for students in schools so we really wanted to sit down and come up with a strategy to partner with the schools so we could do anything we could to help,” Formica said.
“I’m going to encourage my students to be loud because loud people get heard,” said Kevin Flanagan, the principal of Bay Ridge Catholic Academy. Flanagan dressed as a paperboy as part of his sales strategy to motivate his students. Kids who sell at least three orders will qualify to begin earning $10 for each subscription and their school will earn five dollars for each sale.
“If you do the math potentially $250,000 or more can be raised and that will go directly back to students in schools,” Formica said. And that’s not all! Students and schools that have the highest sales will win grand prizes that total $12,000. Flanagan says after a year that’s put financial stress on so many schools, even $3,000 would go a long way.
“That’s approximately half of one student’s tuition to attend schools here,” he explained. “You’ve seen how Catholic schools do more with less. We could do so many things with that $3,000 that would promote healthy practices in the future, student engagement in the classroom and higher levels of learning.”
Students at Bay Ridge Catholic Academy don’t know what it’s like to roll up a newspaper and throw it on somebody’s front steps but they’re already getting excited, and competitive about their digital paper routes.
“Who’s going to win out of the two of you,” Currents News asked students.
“Me, I’m going to win! No, I’m going to win, I have more friends, but I’m better with the family,” argued Christopher and Jenna Ghorra, siblings and students at Bay Ridge Catholic Academy.
Christopher and Jenna are already coming up with their sales pitches, and they’re using what they see in The Tablet as inspiration.
“I see that they want to help people in need and share the good news,” Jenna said.
And using their entrepreneurial spirits to evangelize.