brain snatchers on the move again: using your children as billboards

Continuing on the advertising theme, we have another answer to my perennial rhetorical question: Is there any space that isn't covered in advertising these days?

This time I also ask a related question. How does the US government help support small businesses? By spending trillions on war and pennies on education. From the Boston Globe:

Ads for cigarettes and liquor won't make the cut.

But ads for local ice cream shops or hair salons could soon be appearing on permission slips, class calendars, and school notices sent home with Peabody elementary school students after a unanimous School Committee vote this week.

The novel plan to sell ad space on school communications marks the latest twist in how commercialization of schools — from the sale of billboard space to ads on buses — is generating cash in lean times.

The ads, possibly the first of their kind in Massachusetts, "will have to be age-appropriate, but we’re thinking about ads from local pizza and ice cream shops, dance and karate schools, maybe from a florist or a college," said Superintendent C. Milton Burnett. The initial program aims to earn at most $24,000.