with new 2007 editions and have provided class sets for health teachers. for world language class is, which is on page 14, the insufficiencies listed in the report have either now been resolved or soon will be. i would like to publicly thank linda a. gavin, mary durkheim, and ellen woo, who have worked diligently to provide sites with materials as requests are received. since the end of july, they have prepared text book orders, transferred books from one site to another, and packed boxes to send out from the district warehouse. i will take any questions you have at this moment. commissioner maufas: looking at

the graphs i see here, i guess i am really struggling. when i look at the highest percentages, it looks like they were ordered september 20. do we have the timeline of when those books are going to be received? the percentages are so high. in many cases, 100% of shortages. if they were ordered september 20, do we know when they will arrive? do you know what the students are doing in lieu of having the materials, when the percentage is so high of the shortages? >> i can answer the first question for you. that is that the turnaround usually is one to two weeks. in some cases, we get them within a few days, depending

upon the vendor we are using and how far away they are. the second question as to how sites are remedying the issue at this point -- it would depend on the site. i do not have knowledge of what they are doing to deal with that issue. i imagine they are sharing box. commissioner yee: i am a little shocked with the numbers of atoms in. it seems like in recent years when these reports have come to us, the numbers were to the point where we could complement our efforts. what happened?

how can a site not know that our short 50% of their bookstacks i could accept the excuse we had 10 more students, but we are talking large numbers. i could be wrong. i think we had better numbers in the past. if that is true, what happened? it is almost like a system breakdown. it is not just one school. it is a lot of schools here. what happened in that central office? who is doing what? this is not acceptable. commissioner wynns: -- >> this is high on our radar as well. one of the things we have discovered as well is that in the school system there is not a centralized method for

accounting for textbooks. it is literally going book by book, classroom by classroom, and counting your books. you add into that process the turnover rates you have had in not only teachers but administrators, and you also add the number of books that have walked out of the school with students that have either transferred from the school or moved out of the school system -- this has been a perfect storm this year. i think the staff have done a yeoman's job of trying to get their arms around these numbers this year. we are working very closely with the area teams from the high school area to establish a system that is more centralized, that we will be able to track books and a sign books to students. when students leave a school, we would be able to track that book to where it goes and provide us an opportunity to move supplies

of textbooks from schools that are decreasing in enrollment to schools that are increasing in enrollment. we are in that mobile. right now. it was a perfect storm this year. commissioner wynns: i do not know if commissioner yee wants to respond to that. with all due respect, all of those were present in other years and we did not have this. i want this to be investigated. the funding for instructional materials has been turned into a tier 3 categorical program or does not exist at all. some of the funding, the state has saved money by skipping over adoption and not doing this. i am interested in some analysis of whether we have particularly poor performance here in those areas where if we were doing normal production cycles -- in

other words, the state is expecting us to last more than seven years these sets of books with a publisher cycle of how many they hold back in the publishing runs. my worry is that the whole system of curriculum materials for the state of california is disintegrating because it is based on things that we have now stopped, ruined, or interrupted. i am particularly interested -- i do not expect you to know much about that, if you want to comment on that. but i would like to know who else is talking about this. is this only happening in our school district? is the system falling apart? it is the kind of thing that we need to know so that we can tell people, we can advocate, we can

stand up and say "if you want to cut the budget by doing this, here is the results." is it impossible for us to provide for our students what we are mandated? along the way this year, we need to get a handle on that more so we know what is going on. i wanted to thank you. it is interesting. the specificity, all of these site materialists -- i have not seen that before. that does concern me. certainly, things get lost, used, or exploded or whatever. it seems to me that you do not want to wait until school starts. something may be weak in our own system if we are not doing this survey in may instead of september or august.

i do not know if that is true. i know we have not seen this before. i also know that every member of the board is concerned the we have seen something here that we have not seen in previous years, nothing like this kind of insufficiency not only in equipment areas but more in the textbook area, which is basic material for students to have access to the curriculum. while we certainly need to -- i need also some legal advice. we are required to assess the sufficiency, and this does not look sufficient to me. what is the impact of our saying we do not have sufficient materials? >> we have two months to remedy the insufficiency from the start of the school year. step has to come back and have those books available. commissioner wynns: tonight, we have a resolution before us, and

i do not think that we can assert or say that we have sufficient curriculum materials. >> the resolution outlines the accurate fact that we do not have. the resolution is accurate in terms of our insufficient funding. commissioner wynns: ok. i hope that you will -- this is not a one-time thing. we need to pay attention to this. it is unacceptable, as my colleagues have said. whatever we need to do, we need to do about it. i am a little concerned, as i said. we had all those conditions here last year, yet it looks to me like a lot of high schools in particular were waiting until what is basically a month after school starts. that is not a case either. i am hoping there -- the size we need a better central system,

which of course we do, if we are going to remedy this for this year and it is not going to happen again, and if we are going to have this disintegrating system in the state of california that does not want to provide materials for the kids to learn, we need to do better internally about paying attention and not waiting for a better system. >> commissioner mendoza and then norton. vice president mendoza: one of the things that came up last night is that books are getting shared among teachers and there is a dialogue that happens. a teacher will say i have 10 extra students so they will shove over books to the other side. are you guys aware that that happens? >> we are. vice president mendoza: that kind of contributes to the confusion, i suppose. one of the other things one of the students expressed was very

heartfelt for her. it was being at a school where they felt like they were getting books from another school site and that it was a used book. they are thinking the other school got new books and they got the used books. if there is a way that we can't -- i do not know if they get marked that it is from washington high school, or how that all happens. if the students are feeling that way, it is not a good way for them to feel. i do not know how we remedy that, but there was an expression of feeling kind of -- >> i think that when we go to a centralized system that it will eliminate some of that, because up until this point schools have either purchased books on their own or tried a system to keep up with books on their own. when we come up with a

centralized system where everyone is doing it the same way, we should be able to eliminate some of that because they would be books of san francisco unified school district, not necessarily one particular school. vice president mendoza: i am going to do my plug for technology and say that all of this stuff is available for kids to carry around with them on line. commissioner norton: everybody has expressed the same concerns i have. what i would like to request is that we get a post mortem once you have determined exactly what happened. is it the system breaking down? is it some other thing unique to our district? maybe we could have a report from the curriculum committee in a couple of months, whenever you have such a thing. but i really would like to hear a post-mortem from you about

what broke down, here is what we are going to do differently next time, and here is the context. >> one of the reasons we have appointed daisy in charge of this is really she can do an excellent job of this and understands the issues, understands the problems. we have full faith. we have asked her to be totally up front with the good, the bad, and the ugly. let's work on fixing it. the good highlight of all of this is the fact that we are putting enough funds to be able to do this. that doesn't address the issue, which is how do you find these things. when we were doing the budgets, it was easy to start slashing everything, but we did realize that we did have to put aside

some money because we knew these types of issues. one of the things that is hard to gauge is our adoption of the economic crisis that we have had, the impact it has on things like this, on people holding on to see what happens. the cannot hold office late, because the kids are going to be here whether there is a crisis or not. all those types of things have added. recently, at a meeting with the northern california supervisors, this was the number-one issue. everybody was having these types of problems. the biggest problem we are going to have if this does not resolve soon is that after so many years, the publishers do not necessarily have the books available because that are not going to be published an old book. those are compounding some of our problems. those will get bigger unless the

state acts and starts taking some responsibility for purchasing the materials under the adoption cycles. >> i would like to say in the schools work it is 100 percent, usually those are the new courses the school has not offered before. for example, i know ap account -- ap calculus is summer it was not before. just to let you know that. >> i appreciate the commissioners asking questions and hearing the response to their questions. i am really glad you are going to be tackling this, presenting a centralized system, which we did not have before, right? all of these years.

my next question is without that centralized system, and understanding that folks who were here before had it somehow in their heads -- that is not the issue for you, and i understand that. are we now just doing a sort of -- is it that we are so strapped for money that we really did wait until we found out numbers, and then we ordered? or is it practical to really try to figure out after school bands who has the books? do we track it down? that book is corn, that kid is off to college, and we are moving on? -- that book is gone, that kid is off to college, and we are moving on? >> our past practice has been to

send out a survey at the beginning of the year. usually, that survey is sent the first week of school. this week, it was sent the week before to give staff time to actually look through their building and classrooms to see if they had sufficient books. we have a series of challenges that we can share with you at a later time that would probably shed more light. there is not one reason. there are many reasons why those numbers are the way they are. we would just be happy to share all of that information with you in a full report. >> my last comment on this particular item was really to support what commissioner

mendoza has indicated, that a student said for her it felt like she was receiving a hand me down. a teacher came forward and said, "by the way, we have a network for efficiency but where i have an overage and you have a shortage, let me tell your shortage, and that is the quickest way." that has been how they have dealt with this issue. do we know how long the centralized system will take to get up and running? i am not going to hold you down to it. i just want to hear if you have any idea of the time line. >> i know we are going to be meeting shortly to discuss not only decentralized possibility but all of the other challenges that we face, because it is not just one challenge. there are many things that need to transpire for us to get up and running with this piece.

it would depend on budget also, because one thing is to purchase a textbook management system and another is to provide professional development on that and to identify the personnel who would be charged with that and overseeing network. to purchase if we had the budget would be very quickly. however, it is going to take a little bit of time to implement and to get the system up and running. that would just be one of the challenges we would face. >> i have one last request. it is to talk about technology. we do get that eventually we will not be using paper box. -- paper books. can we find out what that timeline looks like, where some

books will fade away and we will not use those types of books anymore? i feel like that is in science and other areas. i would like to know, as you report to us on an annual basis or by annually, when that is going to be our reality. i would very much like to know that. >> 430 students at presidium middle school, -- for 30 students and presidio middle school, it is already a reality in algebra 1. adoption is going to continue to have a significant impact not only on the technology but on the age of textbooks as we keep them and things of that nature. textbooks do not last forever. it is going to have some impact when we do this report next year. >> i just want to say i am kind

of shocked to say it is a new class so 100% of the books are missing. it ought to be an extraordinary event that a school does not know until school starts that they are going to teach a subject they never taught before. that is on the top of my unacceptable list, that somebody in that school and that somebody who manages them above did not make sure that they were ordering curriculum materials for new courses they were teaching. i mean, there is plenty of areas of concern to go around, here. but that is absolutely unacceptable to me. we have been ordering textbooks centrally. you are just talking about tracking them, knowing where they are, right?

>> i have to express a little surprised about that too, that you would have a new class and not -- i mean, are the sufficiency of materials being available on the first day, is that part of our expectation? it seems to me [laughter] are we putting that in the evaluation for site administrators? if i am creating a new class, i should know when i am doing my master schedule this summer before that i am going to need books, right? >> in most schools across this country and in our school district, you take an inventory when you collect them. you have an idea what to order and you order them before you leave for the summer. >> your implication is that in this district that we do that

when students arrive on the first day of school? >> not at all. this is different. you could order the books and things could shift. you could have a boom in your enrollment. it should be that you order additional books, or maybe you have too many books in which case may be you loaned them to a different school, because you might have ordered more than kids you received, like some of the people here who are having budgets cut because they have the reduction in how many kids show up. it should not be 100%. it should be a very small percent. >> i would think 10% or 15% at the most. if we are saying you have a new class and you have not ordered the books, that is unacceptable. >> that is not always the case. book may not have been available them.

that does happen sometimes where you order the book in the publisher will say, "we are not going to have it until such and such. those to happen. >> the only other question -- we have to remedy this by two months into the school year, october 16? are we to make it? >> i noticed that one thing good on this, if we can find anything good, is that all these art courses. when i look at mission and precalculus and look at john o'connell with ap calculus, i think it is not good they are sure the books, but i think it is really good that the course offerings have been expanded to some of the schools that did not

have these course offerings before. so when i am looking at them adding things like environmental science, i think those are those classes that actually are going to expand the opportunities for students to continue to the act. i have complete faith in you that this is going to get done. i echo what the superintendent said. >> can i say something about the precalculus? i am glad you brought that up. it is one that said that was not available. since the report was sent, we are only missing one book of all of those. that is how much faith i do have said they will be remedied. >> thank you. seeing no further comment, thank you board members for all of

these questions, and thank you staff. commissioner yee: there are a few here that have no comments on there. i am looking at the health one, for example. are we not ordering bookstack? >> as it says in the report, we will not have what has been asked for for teachers. it just says there are not for each student a book. >> roll call, please. [roll is called]

seven ayes. >> thank-you. delegates, if you hear about anything from your schools, contact other staff members on this issue. item and is discussion of other educational issues. there are nine tonight. we are now at item n -- item m is discussion of other educational issues. there are none tonight. now we are at item n -- consent calendar resolutions. do we have a report from staff? i am going to ask the board if we have questions or comments. >> i am want to thank the staff

for the changes in this resolution. i was the one who had raised some questions about language think in particular, the services. -- language bank in particular, the services. i have had very good reports from language 411. i am very pleased to see those. commissioner wynns: i echo that. i want to ask more of a process question. it has come back on the agenda as it is here in the list. if these appeared in the regular way in the case, that has not happened, right?

>> you need to amend the resolution with the new changes. >> will call. -- roll call. [roll is called] >> item o, the consent calendar. [laughter] [laughter] >> we would like to be where