The Seattle School Board also had a key vote last week, and unlike the city council's Olympic deliberations, it wasn't exactly a profile in courage. The occasion was the vote on whether to accept a 10-year, $6.1 million deal to have Coca-Cola be the exclusive soft drink in the vending machines of the school district.

The contract was originally slated to be quietly slipped through in summer, before community activists raised a ruckus and got the vote delayed. Once again on Oct. 7, some 100 people packed the school board meeting, with public comment unanimous in its passionate and articulate denunciation of selling sugar water to kids. It didn't matter. The school board ignored the community, approving the contract by a 6-1 vote (Michael Preston dissenting).

Essentially, money won. Activists feared this contract as a nasty precedent for advertising in the schools; advocates saw the dollar signs being offered to a financially strapped district, and a chance to divert vending revenues to the district rather than allowing individual schools to cut their own deals (as in previous years). The surprise was how cheaply Seattle's kids were sold. These exclusive advertising and vending rights to Seattle schools are worth tens of millions to Coke or Pepsi; the actual value of the contract to SSD was perhaps a couple of million dollars more than the status quo brings into the district.

Any process that auctions off schoolchildren to the highest corporate bidder and then claims its own poverty as the motivator is, essentially, corrupt. It is placing its own institutional needs, and the needs of bureaucrats who are too lazy or secure to find other ways to raise the money or pressure it out of lawmakers, ahead of the needs of the kids. The "needs of the kids," of course, is the god that all the decision-makers in this sorry mess prays to. Nobody last Wednesday night managed to explain why kids need caffeine, sugar water and ads. Only the adults needed it.