Textbook Shortage Sparks Outrage, Study of Spending

Responding to a Times report of major textbook shortages in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Mayor Richard Riordan on Monday called the problem “a crime” against the city’s schoolchildren.

Meanwhile, district administrators launched a review of how schools are spending the teaching materials money they receive.

“Solving this problem must be not just a goal for the LAUSD, it must be Priority 1,” Riordan said. “When one hears these kinds of dismal statistics, it’s no wonder that our children are being failed by the system.”

The Times report outlined a problem that is particularly acute in the district’s high schools, where students routinely lack books to take home in one or more classes.

The shortfall follows a nationwide trend, clearly exacerbated by California’s miserly education spending. But Riordan--who has no direct authority over the school district but has made education a high priority for his second term--said the school district shares the blame for letting the problem fester.

“Every child deserves a quality education, and it’s simply not possible without access to textbooks,” he said in a prepared statement.

In describing the district’s financial review, Deputy Supt. Liliam Castillo said, “The whole critical thing for us is to make sure that there is a policy in place that students will have the basic materials before anything else is bought.”

The Times report noted that Los Angeles Unified spends significantly less on textbooks than other California districts, and that the district’s ability to measure the shortfall has been crippled by the closure of its central book depository, which fell victim to budget cuts in 1990.

School board member David Tokofsky, who first became concerned about the shortages when he was a teacher at Marshall High School, said he would ask fellow board members to approve a motion calling for more general district funds to be added to the textbook budget and restricted for buying books.

At the high school level last year, the district set aside about $75 per student for teaching materials--including textbooks as well as novels, workbooks, computer software and laboratory supplies. Only about $22 of that was was spent on books. New books average about $45 apiece.

Teachers typically cope by keeping a set of 30 classroom books for up to 150 students to share and sending home copies of key chapters or other written materials when they assign homework.

Possible solutions poured in from readers on Monday.

Frances McFall, an aide at a Los Angeles Unified preschool in the Wilshire district, echoed a common reaction when she said parents must be held financially responsible for their children’s books--perhaps by paying a deposit at the start of the year. Principals told The Times that they spend much of their book budget replacing lost books.

“For those who cannot afford [a deposit], maybe the PTA could kick in,” McFall said. “We need to stop playing tiddlywinks with this.”

Terri Corigliano, director of media relations at CBS, suggested establishing an adopt-a-student program in which people could pay for an individual pupil’s books. Corigliano said she would talk up the proposal at work and then give district Supt. Ruben Zacarias a call.

Recalling her own excitement about getting a stack of textbooks every September as a high school student, Corigliano said, “To not have a book is beyond my imagination.”

“I didn’t know about this, and it just breaks my heart,” she said. “People can afford to sponsor students, especially in Los Angeles.”

Every math student at North Hollywood’s Madison Middle School has a book, said teacher Pamela Malak, who chairs the school’s math department. But that is only because Malak took it upon herself to gather castoffs from other campuses.

“It has taken a tremendous amount of personal effort on my part to get books,” she said. “We’ve called every L.A. Unified school and asked for discards, then gone in our cars to get them. . . . I went from the Valley to Carson on my lunch hour to get 100 books.”

A salesman for a used textbook company, Stephen Fuchs, thought he had a simpler answer: Schools such as Birmingham High in Van Nuys have spread their book money farther by buying older books in subject areas where age matters less, such as mathematics and foreign languages.

Fuchs’ firm, Academic Book Services, is one of the two largest used textbook companies in the nation, with good-condition books that average half the price of new ones. Yet he said his success in developing a market in Los Angeles Unified has been complicated by the lack of a centralized book buying department.

When The Times interviewed Zacarias about its findings, he suggested that he might order a districtwide book inventory to determine where shortfalls are greatest and why. However, on Monday Deputy Supt. Castillo said an alternate plan was being discussed under which patterns of school spending would be probed.

She said the district administration must balance its concerns about the shortage with its promises to schools--through official reforms and unofficial vows--that they may control some of their own budgets.

“We don’t want to have a wholesale practice for ‘This is good and this is bad,’ ” Castillo said. “We do have situations where schools choose to have classroom sets [of textbooks] and send home sections of books or other materials.”

State law guarantees each student a textbook for every class, although school officials have broadly interpreted this to mean instructional materials of all kinds.