School officials said that district policy prohibits them from promoting for-profit businesses, but that’s not what triggered the conversation in the first place.

In late November, a disgruntled Vancouver woman wrote an e-mail to Scholastic, complaining about its inclusion of the children’s book, “The Golden Compass.” The book has been perceived by some Christian groups as being anti-Christian.

The author, Philip Pullman, has said that he was “trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief” set forth by author C.S. Lewis.

“(The woman) objected on one basis, but what it did was raise a whole other different issue,” Vancouver Public Schools’ legal counsel Kathryn Murdock said.

The decision to no longer promote Scholastic Book Clubs — a step Scholastic Book Clubs President Judy Newman said by e-mail that she didn’t know of other school districts having taken —  met resistance from parents and teachers.

“It was kind of like we were taking away apple pie,” Murdock said.

The school district handed off the responsibility of Scholastic Book Clubs sales to parent teacher associations, though parents and teachers say it’s highlighted the divide between rich and poor schools.

Teacher-librarian Lori McKinley, who splits her time between Franklin and Fruit Valley elementary schools, said the change has had a huge impact on Fruit Valley, a school with three quarters of its students on free or reduced lunch.

“I met with the PTA at Fruit Valley, and it’s not for lack of wanting, but they’re all working parents, so they can’t come in during the working hours,” McKinley said.

At Franklin, she said, “parents there have the time during the day to come in and do things for the school.”

Still, Franklin parents chose not to sell Scholastic Books because the Parent Teacher Association may not have enough volunteers.

Rosalind Pirkl, Franklin Elementary PTA president, said the PTA polled teachers and found it would be too great an effort to make the switch.

And she didn’t like the idea of posting sales on the school’s Web site, as Chinook Elementary has done, because “it divides the haves and the haves not.”

“You would run into problems with families without credit cards and computer access,” Pirkl said.

Teacher-librarian McKinley said that rookie teachers build their classroom libraries with points earned from Scholastic sales in their classrooms. Those points turn into free books.

“They have good sales — 99 cents, $2.95,” she said. “It’s really hard to find those kind of rates anywhere else.”

That may be, but Vancouver school district officials doesn’t want to burden students with take-home fliers from businesses.

“If we allow Scholastic Book Clubs, there’s no reason we couldn’t allow any other commercial endeavor,” Murdock, the legal counsel, said.

Isolde Raftery can be reached at 360-735-4546 or isolde.raftery@columbian.com.