One of the chronic complaints made against the Bridgeport Public Schools, which runs on a $215.8 million budget, is that there are not enough textbooks in the classroom and to send home with students. At a curriculum committee Thursday, Cynthia Fernandes, director of learning and teaching for the district, said the problem is not a lack of books. Rather, the kind they are, where they are kept and where they go.
Fernandes said teachers are sometimes reluctant to surrender old copies of textbooks they are familiar with, in favor of new sets provided by the district. New books stay packed away in boxes while old incomplete sets favored by the teacher gets used.
She has come across cases where books are delivered to schools and accepted by custodians over the summer while the principal is on vacation, stay locked away and unnoticed in closet because no one told the principal they were there.
When new schools were built and students were redistricted, Fernandes said the plan was to have books move with students. Some were considered unsuitable because of mold issues for their pristine new environments. In other cases, there were not as many books to move as the district thought. It was often up to Fernandes and other staff members to cart books from old schools to new schools in the trunk of their cars.
Fernandes said the district has a bar code system to track books. School officials only recently managed to get it to link books to classrooms and specific students. In many instances books that go home with students never come back. While district policy allows for fines to be collected in such instances, it is hard to collect from students who are homeless and moved around frequently, in foster care and shuffled around frequently or facing some other situation that makes collecting a book fine unlikely.
