By Diana Lambert
dlambert@sacbee.com
Western Placer Unified to the list of California school districts weary of error-filled textbooks.
Fourth- and fifth-grade math teachers in the district, which serves Lincoln and surrounding areas, started school for a second year with mistake-prone teachers editions. They had spent all of last year waiting for corrected student texts from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt School Publishers.
The California HSP Math student texts were replaced over the summer, but the teachers editions were delivered just Monday, said Mary Boyle, deputy superintendent of education services for the district.
Fifth-grade math teacher Dan Burbage-Macaluso said he received four sets of teachers editions over the past 12 months. Some had errors. One was the wrong book.
Replacement of the student books was just as chaotic. The first delivery of texts exceeded the state's limit for errors, Boyle said. The next two were more of the same. The district finally hit pay dirt on delivery No. 4.
There were different kinds of mistakes in the texts, said Burbage-Macaluso, who teaches at Foskett Ranch Elementary. One problem confused length and width. Another asked students to estimate the price of buying a number of bushes without including the price of the bushes, he said.
Western Placer paid the publisher $213,509 for math books for elementary grades.
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