A Losing Battle to Keep Track of Textbooks

I hated accounting for the math textbooks of my 200 students per semester during the 10 years that I taught for the Los Angeles Unified School District. The method was primitive and consumed valuable time and energy.

When I began teaching in 1964, the district provided small blue-and-white book cards, the same ones I had used as a student in the 1950s. When I returned to the LAUSD in 1989 after raising children and teaching for a decade in private school, I found the exact same cards being used to account for textbooks. My secondary school students filled in the textbook’s title, publisher, overall condition and book number, along with the student’s name, homeroom and phone number. I kept one set of cards and sent the other to the textbook room.

In the early 1990s, the district stopped providing even those book cards and left teachers to their own devices. I supplied each student with one index card for the above information plus the full name and work phone numbers for both parents.

Students could be asked to pay for things like school carnivals and dances, photos and yearbooks, school supplies and backpacks. But teachers were never permitted to ask for deposits on textbooks; since students had nothing invested in them, many students had no respect for their costly books. If one were lost or damaged, they would borrow a friend’s and hope the teacher would not notice. Some teachers chose not to notice, simply gathering up textbooks at the end of each semester without verifying numbers and ignoring the student who did not have his or her book.

I believed students needed to be responsible for their taxpayer-provided possessions. So I would verify book numbers several times each semester, and if a student admitted his book was lost, I would send home the appropriate notice asking the parent to pay for the lost book. Replacement cost could be $30 or more, and some students ignored the matter. So I then would have to phone parents to convey the information and also notify the appropriate office to delay issuing that student’s report card or class schedule until payment was received.

Occasionally, I noticed students mutilating their textbooks, using markers to decorate various pages or writing in material that rendered the book useless to another student. They also were required to pay for the book, since it had to be replaced. And parents sometimes reacted angrily at the messenger: me.

Teachers who simply did not worry about the condition or even existence of textbooks once they were handed out had a far easier time. There was never accountability of teachers for their books. A computerized system sounds wonderful, but who will be its eyes? Who will verify that numbers match? Who will notify angry parents that their child owes the school for lost or damaged books?

Teachers assume many roles we never expected, like tracking textbooks of students who don’t always appreciate them.