Some Light in Schoolbook Crisis

The shameful textbook shortage in Los Angeles schools is over, says Supt. Ruben Zacarias. He is certain that high school students this year can count on individual textbooks to use in the classroom and take with them to do homework. The challenge now is to keep the books from disappearing, plunging the district into another crisis.

Zacarias cobbled together a $25-million emergency infusion to meet his monumental goal of restocking secondary schools, where the crisis was most severe, within about one year after a Times series documented a crippling lack of textbooks. In the past, students were forced to share texts and leave them in the classroom for the next set of students.

The Los Angeles Unified School District overcame the shortage by matching the money that the state allocated per pupil for textbook purchases. It set up a special loan fund that allowed desperate principals to buy the books students need now instead of waiting for the next state allocation to trickle down from Sacramento, by pressuring principals to spend their textbook money instead of saving up over several years to buy complete new sets and by using some private donations.

The California Community Foundation had set up the Schoolbook Partnership Fund, which contributed $200,000 outright to buy texts and library books and solicited $300,000 more in donations. With the cooperation of the district, the foundation also commissioned a study to determine how the book shortage got so bad and to find ways to prevent a recurrence. The report pinpoints serious flaws in the district’s campus-by-campus book inventory system. A computerized, online monitoring system that uses bar codes to track books districtwide, which the report recommends, is under consideration and should get urgent financial priority.

The report also singled out the state’s inadequate funding for textbooks, a regular complaint by the L.A. school district. The amount is currently about $17 per pupil per year for secondary schools. Gov. Pete Wilson signed legislation Wednesday to raise the amount to $65 per pupil. That increase will be a big help, but the amount should be raised to $75 to keep fairly current textbooks in every classroom. The district also needs funds to hire experienced, full-time, computer-literate textbook clerks to police campus textbook operations and rid the storerooms of obsolete books.

Zacarias says he believes the weakest link in the textbook chain is student accountability. The state forbids schools to withhold diplomas for book losses and discourages charging students a book deposit, but even so the district needs to invent incentives and punishments to instill in students the value of their hard-won textbooks.