With State Checkbook Open, Some Students Still Lack Texts

Three years after the state Legislature decided to tackle a pervasive textbook crisis, Los Angeles schools are finally starting to restock their depleted bookshelves.

Despite a massive infusion of funds from the state, however, progress is uneven across the district and many students still go without books in some classes or use worn, outdated texts.

At Bell High School, textbooks arrived in such numbers this spring that unopened boxes clogged the book room aisles, and the spillover filled an outdoor shipping container. At San Fernando High, the head of the English department is ordering so many books that he happily finds himself in a “paperwork nightmare.”

“Kids all over campus have new textbooks,” Huntington Park High School teacher Raul Chagoyan said. “It’s basically been a complete turnaround.”

But not at Pio Pico in the Pico-Union area, where there were not enough books this past school year for seventh-grade science. Clarissa Ingram gave up her aging set of books to a less experienced teacher.

“I said, ‘OK, they were newer teachers,’ ” Ingram said. “I used other materials that I purchased or even duplicated. I relied more on them keeping notes.”

A Times examination of textbook use across the Los Angeles Unified School District found that such problems persist for a host of reasons, many of which are unrelated to money. In some cases teachers choose not to use the available textbooks, preferring handouts and photocopies. Uncertainty over how long the state largess will last and shifting curricula have created a reluctance to spend money. Poor management has also contributed to the problem.

As result, the availability of books varies from school to school. And because the district still hasn’t instituted a computer system to track books, there is no sure way to pinpoint problems except by visiting schools. Spot checks by The Times showed that some schools have stacks of textbooks they don’t use. At others, overwhelmed book room staffs cover their needs by cobbling together a variety of editions.

With schools having a total of $83 million in textbook funds this past year, Los Angeles Unified’s chief financial officer, Joe Zeronian, said there is no good reason for shortages to persist.

“There’s no financial crisis here,” Zeronian said. “The schools have the money they need to meet demands. Yet, I know there are kids who don’t have textbooks.”

The district has a clear policy on textbooks: Every student should have a book to take home in every core subject. But the policy isn’t always followed, or even recognized. Stately John Marshall High School in Los Feliz exemplifies the confusion.

A visit to Marshall turned up a dozen students who complained about not having textbooks in classes including U.S. history, integrated math III, and advanced physical science.

Senior Roxanne Albeno, 17, said she shares a math book in class with another student. Because the students cannot take books home, they spend the final 10 minutes each day copying homework assignments.

“I often copy down the questions so fast that I make mistakes--like write down a plus instead of a minus,” Albeno said. “As a result, I get wrong answers.”

Unlocking the door of the campus’ book room, Principal Thomas Abraham said, “Let me show you what’s really going on here.”

Some Prefer Not to Use Texts

Stacked high on the shelves were hundreds of copies of every text the students said they were lacking. Among them were hundreds of shiny U.S. history texts, copyright 1999.

Abraham attributed the “shortages” at his school to some teachers’ preferring not to use textbooks.

“In a school with 220 teachers you’re going to find some teachers who may not rely on books in class for whatever reasons,” he said. “That’s their prerogative.”

Similarly, at Dahlia Elementary in Eagle Rock, math books go unused because some teachers don’t like their nontraditional method. In those classes, teachers have been relying instead on copies of pages from a workbook that stresses traditional math.

Dahlia Heights Principal Eileen Hatrick conceded: “There are some teachers who are not comfortable with the method of instruction in the book we selected.”

Much of the textbook aversion, as well as the instinct to hoard textbook funds, may have been shaped by years of scarcity.

Skimpy state annual textbook allowances of $23 per student were reduced during the recession of the mid-1990s. The new low of $17.50 represented about a third of the cost of the average text. Thus a student with five academic classes could expect to receive a new book in each subject on average every 15 years, assuming no losses along the way.

The Times published a story in 1997 about textbook shortages in the district that generated public outrage. A short time later the Legislature attempted to wipe out the problem with a blast of money. More than $1.5 billion has been budgeted for new textbook and library purchases since 1998, more than doubling annual spending. More money is being set aside in this year’s budget.

For the school year just ended, L.A. Unified’s combined book budget was more than double that of 1998.

The money is only now beginning to have an impact at schools. There were seeds of delay in the legislation. The biggest chunk of the money--$1 billion spread over four years--could be spent only on materials that comply with the state’s new “back to basics” curriculum standards.

Since some of those standards were still on the drawing boards, local school officials were caught in a waiting game. The state Board of Education adopted its list of approved textbooks for history and social studies in 1999, and is not expected to complete the math approvals until early next year.

A survey by a textbook publisher 14 months after the money became available found that about a third of the districts responding had not spent a dime of that $1 billion.

The bumps in the state funding process multiplied in the huge Los Angeles school bureaucracy.

A Times computer analysis of school budgets shows that little of the state money was spent in the 1998-99 school year, and this past year’s funds were being spent unevenly. While Le Conte Middle School in Hollywood, for example, had spent about $150,000, or nearly 60%, of its state book funds by April of this year, nearby Berendo Middle School in Koreatown had spent barely 35%. Year-end figures were not available.

One reason schools weren’t spending their money was confusion over district policy. Early in the year, orders came from district headquarters to save it until the state put out a new list of approved math books in January. But in March, Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller told principals to spend the money. He was alarmed to see more than $40 million in school accounts and attributed it to mismanagement.

One hundred thirty schools had more than $100,000 in book accounts, including a dozen with more than $300,000.

This spring, San Fernando High School counted $315,867.29 in unspent book funds. Assistant Principal Sharon L. Smith said it takes time to spend the money.

For the 1999-2000 school year, Smith said, she focused on replacing old, torn and vandalized textbooks for the four core subjects--English, math, science and social studies.

Smith said it took teachers in the core departments several weeks to agree on what new textbooks to select. The teachers had to study state and district standards and the school’s curriculum before selecting the new books.

“There’s a lot of philosophical differences among teachers about the type of textbooks to use,” Smith said. “Reaching a consensus took a lot of discussion.”

Such decisions are even more difficult at year-round schools.

At Bell, for example, there are only two points in the school year when teachers from all three tracks are on campus at once, said social studies department head Nancy Brown.

When one of those opportunities arrived last fall, Brown said, the department hadn’t yet been able to review all the 10th-grade world history series approved by the state. Consequently, she had to wait until a track change this spring to make her recommendations for the 1,200-book purchase.

“It really is a much greater problem here than at the traditional schools,” Brown said.

Consequently, Bell was one of the schools targeted by district officials this spring for failing to spend its book money. In March, it still had more than $500,000 in book accounts. But Bell finally broke the logjam, spending about $170,000 in April in time to have the books for the start of the new school year, which started this month.

Year-round schools must also decide whether to purchase textbooks for all their students or for only the two-thirds on track at any one time. The difference--considering the average textbook costs about $50--amounts to tens of thousands of dollars at a 3,000-student high school.

Having little faith in the long-term reliability of the current book bonanza, most administrators make the less costly choice.

That means, though, that students who have three two-month breaks in their school year do not get to take books home with them. And the school faces a logistical nightmare with each track change, gathering up books from the departing track and distributing them to the new one.

“Every eight weeks, books coming in, books going out,” said Bell’s administrative assistant, Charlene Roche.

The district’s worsening space crunch makes efficient book management all but impossible at some schools.

Berendo, for example, doesn’t have a book room large enough for all its books. Department heads in math, social studies and science store theirs separately in closets.

Math department head Nour Zolfeghary has devised a distribution system in which other teachers leave book requests in drop-off boxes.

But Berendo’s ingenuity masks a fundamental failure in the district’s efforts to ensure that every student has a book: even if there are enough books, no one knows for sure.

When asked by The Times for an inventory of Berendo’s books, Principal Esther Rivera had to ask each department head to draw up a list by hand. The Berendo list, like those provided by several other schools, showed a collection of multiple titles in old and new editions all adding up to more than a sufficient stock for all students.

Impossible to Inventory Books

Many principals were unable to provide an inventory of their textbook supplies. They said they didn’t have time, and the book room clerks were part-time, or new, and kept track of books by manual check-out card.

Pio Pico book room clerk Grace Nao said she does not have an accurate count of the school’s books because teachers don’t want to turn them in at the end of school year.

“Teachers want the textbooks in their rooms,” said Nao, who also doubles as the school’s coordinator of federal anti-poverty funds. “How can I run an inventory of everything if I don’t actually see the books?”

The deficiencies of the district’s pencil and paper book accounting were so glaring three years ago that the California Community Foundation donated $500,000 for a computer tracking system. That system will not be running until the end of the 2000-2001 school year, said Jim Konnantz, the district’s director of instructional technology.

In the meantime, some schools, such as Bell, have received computers to track books and have dedicated staff members to entering each book into the database and sticking on the bar codes. Other schools are still waiting for the computers, while some have them but aren’t yet using them because of inadequate staffing.

Until every school enters all its books, officials downtown still will have no efficient way of knowing which schools are fully supplied.

Last month, the board held a hearing, ostensibly to answer that question, but it gleaned little information.

The hearing is required each year by the California Department of Education as a condition for receiving the new book money. If the district concludes as a result of the hearing that not every student has an up-to-date book in every core subject, it must supplement its book funds by digging into other accounts such as federal anti-poverty grants or school improvement grants.

John Mockler, executive director of the state Board of Education, said the hearings should be advertised so that students, parents and teachers can tell their stories.

But Los Angeles school officials took a notably low-key approach in their hearing just before the deadline last month. There was no advertising and no students or teachers spoke. The board acknowledged that the district is not in compliance and blamed the state, saying it hadn’t provided enough money.

The voices the board didn’t hear would have given a far more textured verdict:

The voice, for example, of Reseda High freshman Ronnie Kroll who described books in which white tape masks page numbers, chewed gum glues pages together and gang graffiti obscures the type.

“It’s OK, though, I’m used to terrible textbooks,” he said.

Or the counterpoint of Granada High sophomore Jonathan Rene Castillo. “Most of my books are pretty new,” he said. “My math book is, like, 3 years old, but even that is pretty new.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Turning Money Into Books

Since 1998, annual state funding for textbooks has almost tripled. Most--$1 billion over four years--comes from a new program to buy books that match new state standards.

*--*

State Book Appropriations Fund (in millions) 1997-98 1998-99 1999-2000 2000-01 Kindergarten-8th grade instructional materials $117.6 $120.9 $124.6 $131.1 9th-12th grade instructional materials $29.7 $30.9 $32.1 $33.8 State standards-based instructional materials -- $250.0 $250.0 $250.0 Total $147.3 $401.8 $406.7 $414.9

*--*

*

Little of the standards-based money reached Los Angeles schools in the first year of the program, and hardly any was spent. This past school year, the district’s textbook budgets more than doubled, but on average, the schools spent less than 60% of the money.

*--*

L.A. Unified Spending 1998-99 Budget % Spent Kindergarten-8th grade instructional materials $24.62 million 54% 9th-12th grade instructional materials $3.60 million 54% State standards-based instructional materials $6.86 million 1% Total $35.09 million 44%

*--*

*

*--*

L.A. Unified Spending 1999-2000 (as of April 27) Budget % Spent Kindergarten-8th grade instructional materials $24.40 million 57% 9th-12th grade instructional materials $4.65 million 59% State standards-based instructional materials $54.57 million 56% Total $83.63 million 56%

*--*

*

Note: Figures are rounded.

Sources: L.A. Unified School District, California Department of Education

Data analysis by Doug Smith / Los Angeles Times