PEORIA -- The Peoria District 150 School Board met Feb. 25, and during the public comment session, at the end of the meeting, heard Sharon Crews' comments on the bar coding of textbooks. It's reprinted below.
I was not at the meeting, but here is a recording of all the comments.
The board continues to mislabel its meeting on the second Monday of the month as 'committee of the whole' even though the meetings are identical to the regular meetings. It relegates comments to two minutes at the end of the sometimes long meeting.
These 'committee of the whole' meetings take place at 6 p.m., not 6:30 p.m., the regular meeting time. And they're at a different school every month, an imposition on the schools and the public, as the parking lots often are not lighted and the locations unfamiliar to those outside the neighborhoods.
All this to discourage public comments, apparently.The comments are blacked out during the web-streaming process, I am told.
Here's what Crews said:
"I am never sure what you board members know and what you don’t know.
Do you know that the very expensive bar-coding process is being conducted now and that probably a significant number of students have been without books for a week or more?
Why shouldn’t we assume that this fiasco shows a complete lack of regard for the educational process, teachers, and students?
This action was taken without prior notice to teachers that they would be teaching without textbooks.
Also, I wonder if you understood how well the old system worked before you spent close to a million dollars on a new system. I assume you know that all books were numbered consecutively for each book title and that a number was recorded on the cards students filled out for each book so that there was never any question as to which book was given to which student.
The card was given to the student as a receipt when the book was turned in. Did you know that there is a very good chance that these cards were not used in the collection of books that is occurring now?
Do you realize that the books that some students turned in might not be the ones that were originally issued to them? Students frequently borrow another’s books when they lose their own. Happens all the time.
How are students going to be responsible for lost books if the cards weren’t checked?
Please remember to ask how long the bar-code stickers stay on the books undamaged.
I believe the impetus for buying this expensive machine was that the administration believed that some schools were hoarding a significant number of books. The system broke down some time ago because textbooks were no longer sent back to the warehouse at the end of every year to be inventoried.
That problem could have
been fixed without spending so much money on a bar-coding system that is not
going to solve the problems of lost books.
The District can’t find lost books.
Books stored at a school could be found with a return to an effective
inventory system and without an expensive bar-coding system. Too
late now."
Well said!
-- Elaine Hopkins
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