Textbook Donation Campaign Raises $300,000 in a Month

The California Community Foundation, which began a $1-million fund-raising drive to ease school textbook shortages after a Times examination of the problem, has raised more than $300,000 in the last month.

On Thursday, the nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in Los Angeles wrote its first $25,000 check to the Compton Unified School District. Compton and the Inglewood Unified School District are to share slices of a pie that will mostly be consumed by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

So far, donations to the foundation’s Schoolbook Partners Fund include $50,000 from an anonymous donor who said he was personally touched by the thought of students trying to study without books, to $12,000 from American Pacific Bank in Sherman Oaks, to be distributed to schools near its San Fernando Valley branches. The vast majority of the contributions came from individuals, not companies, some of whom asked that their money go to their neighborhood school or their children’s school.

“This issue has really focused a lot of people for whom school reform and the problems with the district were just too amorphous,” said foundation spokesman Allan Parachini. “Understanding that was like trying to pin Jell-O to a wall and this is like, well, trying to put a book on a shelf.”

On Nov. 18, the foundation launched its fund-raising drive by contributing $200,000 to five Los Angeles Unified high schools. The group said it would try to raise $1 million more by June 30, and would help districts set up better distribution systems to streamline buying and limit book loss.

The fund-raising was triggered by a Times story last July that focused on the widespread textbook shortfall in the Los Angeles district, where students are often prevented from taking books home because one set of texts must be shared by several classes. The problem was caused by a combination of lagging state funding, increasingly expensive books, high loss rates and competing demands for instructional materials money at the district and campus level.

In response to the story, Supt. Ruben Zacarias dedicated $5.8 million more to books and launched an audit to determine the extent of the shortage. That survey is not yet complete, but district staff said preliminary estimates indicate that it would take $15 million to provide a book or other take-home material for every student in every class as required by district policy and the state Constitution.

Compton Unified recently estimated that at the middle school and high school levels it has just one book for every two children and needs about $685,500 to achieve a 1-1 ratio. The $25,000 given by the foundation Thursday would only be enough, for example, to buy the science books needed at Compton High.

Compton’s financial and achievement problems led to a state takeover of the district in 1993, and this week a court ordered the state to fulfill various promises, including providing books for every student.

Barry Engelberg, the district’s community partnership manager, said the foundation assistance will provide more immediate relief.

Representatives of the California Community Foundation are scheduled to meet with Los Angeles district officials today to begin deciding how to distribute the money equitably. That chore is complicated by some of the donations being earmarked for specific schools.

For example, American Pacific Bank’s donation requires the school district to determine which schools are nearest branches in various parts of the San Fernando Valley and in Valencia. The bank had recently given some of its used computers to nearby schools and saw the book-funding drive as an opportunity to continue that commitment.

“Our strategy is to try to give back to the community we serve and we feel that education is a critical need,” said Tamara Gurney, chief executive officer. “We hope these children will become adults . . . who work here, start businesses here and contribute to the economic growth of the Valley.”