Order textbooks for the following year. Once textbooks are delivered to the school site, textbook distribution and management is delegated to school principals through the district's site-based management philosophy. Principals use a variety of book management strategies to avoid textbook losses. Some schools issue a take-home set of textbooks for students and maintain a class set for students to use while in school. Other schools allow students to check out books overnight.
Many schools supplement homework assignments by using take-home duplicated worksheets.
Teachers in TSPR focus groups report that it is difficult to find effective homework assignment sheets that correlate with the TEKS, and would prefer to assign homework from course textbooks. They feel that students are not receiving homework assignments that will be most beneficial in supplementing in-class instruction. Enforce take-home book policies and adopt new penalties to hold students and parents accountable for lost, stolen and damaged textbooks. The district should enforce its standard textbook take-home policy and let students take their books home if their parent or parents will accept financial responsibility. District policy should be modified to specify that parents must sign a one-time permission note for all of the textbooks distributed to their children.