We are petitioning the School District of Palm Beach County to provide our elementary students with current, research based textbooks that support the new Language Arts Florida Standards and the Mathematics Florida Standards. Our current materials for these subjects are outdated and do not support the rigor or line of questioning that will be presented to our students for the upcoming Florida State Assessment.

The Go Math Florida textbook that they currently have was created over two years ago to support the PARCC Assessment, which was voted out two months into the school year. The state stockpiled five years worth of these books and we are being forced to use them even though they do not aligned with the MAFS Standards and the FSA Assessment.

The current reading program is inconsistent from class to class and school to school. There is no textbook, only a book room with novel sets on various reading levels. Teachers cannot always access the particular books they need to teach a certain skill and are forced to make up their own curriculum. The curriculum is being made up by district curriculum personnel as they go along from month to month. This requires extra salaries being paid along with money spent on substitute teachers when teachers are taken away from their students to attend training every time a new unit is presented. Recently NINE MILLION sheets of paper were used to run off test preparation materials for third through fifth grade students. This is only for five weeks of instruction! The tax payers money would have been better spent on a sound, research based textbook series that supports LAFS Standards and the FSA Assessment.