By Gerardo R. Partido
Variety News Staff

SPEAKER Mark Forbes, R-Sinajana, yesterday urged the Guam Public School System to review its textbook procurement policy, which previously resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars being wasted, in light of the education agency’s continuing financial difficulties.
Forbes recommended the textbook procurement review at yesterday’s roundtable discussion on GPSS.
According to GPSS, it needs $3.5 million to purchase new textbooks, especially for language arts because of recent updates.
While Forbes said he realizes the need for new textbook purchases, he said GPSS would do well to review its textbook policy in order to realize savings that could be used for other pressing needs.
“I don’t want you to order millions of dollars worth of books and then just leave those books to waste and rot at some warehouse storage facility,” the speaker said.
Dr. Jose Q. Cruz, a member of the current Guam Education Policy Board and a former vice chairman of the previous board, said that if a certain textbook has a copyright that does not exceed 10 years, GPSS can still make use of it and does not have to order the updated version right away.
“I think we can stay with the current language arts books. We can use the books we have now,” Cruz said.
GPSS Superintendent Luis Reyes agrees. He said for math and language arts textbooks, most of the lessons are invariably the same.
“For history textbooks, perhaps, using newer books is necessary because history is always updated. But we need to completely re-assess our policy on language arts and math textbooks because we really don’t need to update in these areas,” Reyes said.
Forbes said the allocation of textbooks to the island’s various schools also needs to be streamlined to make it more efficient.
If a school, for instance, needs certain textbooks that another school has a surplus of, then those books can be diverted to that school instead of ordering new books.
In the past, Forbes said surplus textbooks have just wasted away in storage while certain schools needed them.
“Maybe we can also have an overlapping system so that older books can still be utilized by the schools instead of not having any until the new batch of textbooks comes in,” Forbes said.
During the senators’ recent tour of various public schools, Forbes said he was informed that schools continue to lose a lot of books because there is no proper accounting system for the books.
“In our tour, schools officials also told us that there was lax enforcement with regard to lost textbooks,” Forbes said.
Because of the problems plaguing GPSS’s textbook policy, Forbes has asked Reyes not to place a new order for textbooks until more information can be provided to the Legislature.
Specifically, Forbes wants an inventory of the current textbooks that GPSS has and the number of students that need new textbooks.