A Digital Divide

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2005

No state should be forced to make a Solomon-like decision between laptops and books for their students. Yet that's what appears to be taking place this year in Texas.

The Texas state legislature has proposed a new law to outfit all secondary students with laptops at an estimated cost of $707.7 million over the next two years, according to Craig Tounget, executive director of the Texas Parents and Teachers Association (www.txpta.org).

The problem is, textbooks that should have arrived in Texas classrooms for the 2004–2005 school year have been collecting dust in warehouses because the legislature has deferred paying the $327 million publisher's tab. While lawmakers have now agreed to fund those books, the $378 million that was slotted for textbooks for the 2006–2007 school year is being postponed instead.

"Laptops obviously are the future," says Tounget. "But there aren't any history or science books to use on those laptops. You can't just hand a kid a laptop and say, 'That's all you need.'"

Books that should have been in classes this year include those for English as a second language. Books that schools expected in 2006—and will now have to wait for—include volumes on foreign languages, fine arts, health, and physical education.

With the legislature still in session, lawmakers could end up funding books for both the 2004–2005 and 2005–2006 school years, but the budget bills seen by Tounget have only shown funds for 2004–2005. Repeated calls to State Rep. Kent Grusendorf, who chairs the state legislature's House Public Education Committee (www.house.state.tx.us), were not returned.

Textbooks are scheduled to be replaced every seven to nine years, according to Tounget. And every year, the Texas State Board of Education makes the money available to the legislature to pay for them.

"But the state's $10 billion in the hole," says Tounget. "So the money went somewhere else."