Recently, a student in Mr. Chandler’s class suddenly felt ill. Unfortunately for the U.S. history book that was on his desk, the student did not move quick enough to get to the trash can.  The book is just one more casualty in a set of text books with missing pages and torn covers.  Mr. Chandler  was able to get only one class set of both World and U.S. history books for his classes this year, but because of that, students aren’t able to check books to take home from the finance office. Because of this, he has had to change how he gives homework. The lack of new books and the condition of the books in the classroom means that if a book gets a page torn out or damaged, Mr. Chandler says, “It is what it is.”  He just has the student get another book that hopefully has the page. He has minimized book use and gone to outside sources on his own to make it easier for the students and him, while still maintaining the integrity of what teaches.

The need for new books, but a lack of funding, not only is a problem for replacing damaged books, but also getting newer additions with more current information. Whether this is because of a lack of funding from the state or because the money was distributed elsewhere is unknown.

The school’s finance manager, Mrs. Emrich, states that there is a budget, but it usually takes affect at the end of the year and it depends on things like how many students are attending our school, how many sections of classes are going to be opening, and also the District Governing Board has to agree and “adopt” a new version that they like. That is one of the main reasons for textbooks being so old and rarely get replaced. Mrs. Emrich has been personally trying help by talking to other schools and asking them if they have any books that they aren’t using.  If so, she has them sent here so our school can borrow them for the school year and vice versa, if another school has a class that we don’t offer, they’ll ask us for books on the subject.

Even though it might not seem like it, our school did receive many new books. For AP classes, Sahuaro got new books for Biology, World History and Chemistry.  There is a new edition for the psychology book, more Econ books, literature books for all grade levels, some French books and lots of Spanish books for first and second year. A goal of our finance manager is to find out just how many textbooks Sahuaro actually has because there are a lot of class sets not in the system and that affects which books get priority in being replaced first.