Zacarias Moves to Combat Textbook Shortage

Declaring that the Los Angeles Unified School District textbook shortage is partly a failure of decentralization, Supt. Ruben Zacarias on Monday said he would initiate a districtwide quarterly book inventory to pinpoint where shortages are worst.

Furthermore, Zacarias said he will demand that schools make books the top priority for instructional-material funds, pointing out that high schools had at least $72 a student last year available for materials--yet spent on average less than a third of that on textbooks.

Zacarias said he would not allow campuses to continue to shortchange students on books. “They need to know specifically that local decision making does not give that much autonomy,” he said.

One of the reasons Los Angeles Unified has so little control over its textbook supplies is that it abolished its central book warehouse and ordering department in 1990 to save money. However, any attack on campus independence is not expected to go over well in reform circles, which contend that the only way to save the massive district is to give more power to individual campuses.

“I think that edict is redundant and plain unnecessary,” said Mike Roos, president of the district’s largest reform program, LEARN. “The more valuable message would be helping school communities understand that this is an important item for kids. . . . At high-functioning LEARN schools, they don’t make trade-offs for books.”

The district’s rampant book-loss problem is best solved at the campus level, Roos said. Being accountable for books “has to be a school site ethic.”

Zacarias, responding to public pressure generated by a Times article last week that detailed the impact of textbook shortages, said he had expected that some criticism would greet his plans, but “someone has to draw the line.”

“We’ve been talking about this problem on the [school] board and nodding our heads for too long,” he said. “I’m going to do something about it.”

He also tried to lessen the sting by taking some of the responsibility for addressing the shortfalls, saying he will ask the school board to approve a textbook replacement fund for lost and damaged books.

That fund would essentially be an advance of a campus’ textbook funds for the coming year. Zacarias said that because the money is not an outright grant, schools will be more likely to improve their book-tracking systems.

Book loss and destruction were cited by principals and teachers interviewed by The Times as among the reasons for the textbook shortage--particularly crippling because books are so expensive to replace. But no districtwide inventory has been readily available since the district closed its central warehouse.

Since then, each school has been charged with ordering its own books, using money from several “instructional-materials” funds that also must cover other classroom items such as computer software, laboratory supplies, workbooks and, in some cases, paper and pencils.

Discussing the shortage publicly for the first time since the Times article appeared, school board members on Monday generally echoed Zacarias’ comments about decentralization and supported his call for an inventory. They scheduled a full discussion of the issue for Aug. 18.

Member Barbara Boudreaux characterized the shortage as mostly “media hype.” But member Victoria Castro said that her own survey of schools in her Eastside district uncovered wide discrepancies in book supplies.

Board President Julie Korenstein questioned the validity of statewide averages because the data is collected by a consortium of textbook publishers. She suggested that they could underestimate in the interest of selling more books,.

Board member David Tokofsky disagreed. “I think what you really have is a [school] culture in which there is a belief that the book is somehow anachronistic,” he said.

The district disputes some of the figures used in The Times’ report. Administrators contend that if adult-school students are taken out of the formula, local schools spent an average of $32 per student on textbooks. That would be near the meager state average of $33, which ranked California 47th in the nation for book spending.

Increasingly, however, district officials are acknowledging that the shortage exists and is serious, especially at high schools, which were the primary focus of The Times’ story. Average book spending of about $22 per high school student appears to lag far behind statewide averages.

Zacarias said the numbers debate does not interest him because there is ample anecdotal evidence that students lack take-home books in some classes. That is why he said he plans to begin his textbook effort with a thorough inventory, which he said probably will end with a recommendation to the school board to set aside more of the district’s overall budget for books.

The superintendent, who pledged to make sure there is a textbook for every student in every Los Angeles Unified class, said he is eyeing additional state grants expected this year. “There’s no better use of one-time money than to go out there and build up the textbook stock in schools,” he said.

Tokofsky, who has been the school board’s strongest voice on book shortfalls, said he would propose a five-year plan to increase the textbook budget out of either general fund or state lottery revenues.

Although Tokofsky agreed that a strong message about the importance of books must come from the top, he also said it is unfair to blame decentralized decision-making for creating the problem.

“That’s like accusing someone on welfare of buying a Twinkie,” he said. “You’re still providing substandard support.”