Several alumni have asked about postcards purportedly from TCHS "urgently" requesting contact and other personal information from alumni (image; click for larger view). We do not know whether these are legitimate, and we urge caution in responding. We will be checking with TCHS after the holidays to see if there is any connection to the school.
(Since TCHS is not in Chesapeake, VA, perhaps this should be a tip-off. We also wonder how "urgent" an alumni address update could be. Our skeptical antennas are up, and we anticipate more junk mail with something other than glee. We'll keep you posted. Ed.)
UPDATE - JANUARY 31 - It's a commercial directory service ("Harris Connect") that's actually a direct mailing operation. It works something like this. They seduce the school into asking alumni into providing all their contact info and they cross-relate that info with publicly available databases. They also start with whatever info the school already has (many schools unlike TCHS have extensive contact lists). Then they send them spam and junk mail until the end of time. You can also buy a book listing all the (correct and false) information for about $100.
They give the school a tiny piece of the action. That's the seduction.
I checked with TCHS, and they are indeed "sponsors" of the project. They did something similar about ten years ago, but of course all that information is wildly out of date and wasn't very accurate to begin with. The one I saw from back then had me listed two or three times under variations of my name (I was Alex, Alex Rees, A. Rees and/or Rees), all under Class of 1960, as I recall. Very few are actually sold, as I understood it from the former principal; the real deal is the mailing list.
Harris is apparently very successful. To paraphrase Barnum, "there's a high school administrator with budget problems born every minute." No offense intended; this is hard to spot when well presented, and they present it well. They are not without their detractors, as a simple web search like "harris connect alumni complaint" will demonstrate.
As you might imagine, we are not amused by all this. If 2/3 of all alumni were to send us $100 (total = about $1,000,000) we could endow TCHS Alumni News, hire and pay a part-time professional editor essentially forever and use the surplus to give away about $50,000 in scholarships annually, also essentially forever. But then, why would we want to do that when we can send money to Chesapeake, Virginia?
It continues to amaze me that alumni would rather pay commercial entities who couldn't find TC on a map to save their lives instead of getting behind a community project by and for actual alumni. Perhaps Wm. J. Lederer had it right back in 1961. -RC
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