[CALIBK12] Teacher accountability for textbooks and equip

[Janet Hasbrouck]

Hi Megan, 
 
You raise a good question and one that districts have been reluctant to address. The result of this has been requiring us to account for all of the pieces and they still get "lost" as you have experienced. The cost of replacing some TE materials can be in the hundreds of dollars, when they were originally included with the adoption of the book.
 
David, Kate and you have all made comments that I agree with about processing and barcoding. I have reduced the job to barcoding the TE, the CD with all of the materials in digital format, various pacing or mapping guides, and just handing out the rest of the pieces. This past year we created boxes and lists with everything we received for a particular prep, gave it to the teacher, had them sign a copy of the list which we keep on file, and checked out to them the particular pieces we had barcoded. It has seemed to work so far, but the one thing we can be sure of is that anything to do with textbooks can change!
 
I have another bone to pick here. Why are the publishers wasting trees, energy and space printing all of the supplemental materials, and then turning around and giving it all to us on CDs? We can print out what we need from the CDs and teachers wouldn't have to keep 12-18 inches of precious shelf space to store all the stuff. If a teacher has 2 or 3 preps, that could take whole bookcase! I had to ask the district carpenter to create a new locked cubby hole at the back of the book stacks here in the library to put the "extra" 2 or 3 sets of teacher materials that we have for every new book we have received in the last 2 text adoptions. It's overwhelming and we are adopting science this year, so here comes some more. 
 
Janet HasBrouck, Librarian
Arcadia High School

>>> Megan Fuller <meg_ful at msn.com> 3/26/2008 10:02 AM >>>

Lori's question about barcoding teacher materials made me wonder, is there any ed code, rule, or policy regarding teacher accountability for the loss of materials?  
 
In my district, unless a teacher has some sort of inner voice that says, "It is right to pay for things you lose." (We used to call it a "concience") we do not get replacement funds.  I have one teacher, retiring this year, who has lost nearly $3000.00 worth of materials, including a loptop, library books, and classroom sets of textbooks, from her classroom over the past eight years.   This year, I handed a complete, brand new, teacher set of science materials, to a new teacher who sharing a 1/2 year contract.  When he left at the semester, he returned only the Teacher's Edition, having mislaid the entire bankers box of CD's, & assessments etc....Oh well, too bad for the teacher that he's sharing the contract with.  

Do your districts also count this as the cost of doing business, or do they charge the teachers?  

Megan Fuller 
Aptos Junior High 
http://www.aptosjr.pvusd.net/library/ 

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. 
-- Wernher von Braun 



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