School Textbooks
Emila Lopez
There hasn’t been a single day this school year where a discussion of the new textbooks for students taking college classes failed to come up. The conversation centers around the fact that new, and very expensive, college textbooks are now being provided to students for free by our high school.
Mr. Walker, HHS principal, said, “I think it’s a good opportunity. I know the school board announced they would do this back in the spring of 2016, and, logistically, I knew it would be tough. For the benefit of the students, I’m glad we are able to do this and help them out with a small cost.”
According to senior, Esther Moats, the costs of college classes last year were quite pricey compared to those of this year.
Moats said, “Classes were about a two hundred dollars a piece, so I took two classes and then books ranged from eighty to a hundred dollars depending on if you bought them used or brand new.”
Although many feel relieved from the burden of paying for college textbooks, students, parents, teachers, and principals have become uneasy because some important textbooks have taken their sweet time arriving.
Mr. Walker said, “We were given the list of books a little bit late, and, in order to save as much money as possible and not buy exclusively through Angelina Bookstore, we had to order some from Amazon and other various vendors. That slowed us down a little bit, but they can in slowly but surely.”
Exactly how important can a textbook be on the first week of school? Ms. McKinney, a history professor at Angelina College, has been known to give her students a quiz over the first chapter of the textbook on the second day of class. This year, only a single student had a textbook at the time. However, Hudson faculty members have proven themselves to be great troubleshooters.
Sylvie Gowin, a student of McKinney’s, said, “The principals came up with a temporary solution by making many copies of the first chapter. Although I would have rather had my textbook, the copies worked just fine.”
Despite this slight inconvenience, college students are glad that the costs of textbooks will be completely covered by Hudson ISD in the future. Principals are optimistic that the process will be effortless next time.
Mr. Walker said, “Now all students have all the books they need in the first week and a half of classes, but from this point forward we have all the books we need. They’re checked out and we’ll be checking those back in, and this should go much smoother second semester.”
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