Salinas City Elementary School District schools still without textbooks
The fact that no one disputes is that some teachers and students at Salinas City Elementary School District Schools are still without textbooks.
“If one kid does not have a textbook, if one school does not have textbooks, if one teacher does not have textbooks, that’s a community issue and it needs to be resolved,” said Sean Henry, a parent of two at Mission Park Elementary School.
He also attended a board meeting on Sept. 8.
“If you teachers had just spoke up and said you didn’t have the stuff, if you had spoken before we approved that resolution, we could not approve the resolution because it’s not true,” said board member Foster Hoffman at the Sept. 8 school board meeting.
Hoffman is referring to a resolution that the board passed saying each student had sufficient textbooks.
Superintendent Dr. Juvenal Luza said the district has bought all of the books. That may be true but some teachers have yet to physically get those books, a month and a half into the year.
“There are always, during a school year, going to be occasions when there are outstanding orders,” said Assistant Superintendent Lori Sanders.
Sanders opened the district book vault, a storage area where all the textbooks and teaching materials are kept and where she said they prepare for 10 percent enrollment overage. But this year it was more.
“Dealing with projections and then dealing with the actual numbers of students, there’s a gap,” Sanders said.
There also seems to be a gap with the publishers, she said, as multiple districts cause some orders to be backlogged.
“It’s not the principal and it’s not the teachers, it’s a system that’s not working right and they don’t want to listen to the people and the reality is that there are teachers and there are students that do not have textbooks that they need in the classroom right now,” Henry said.
The process of ordering textbooks is one Sanders said she is always looking to refine and admits that changes need to be made.
Sanders added that on Wednesday, 17 different book orders were distributed to schools in the district.
