AMNESTY: Wairarapa College teacher Katherine Cronin is calling for a community-wide amnesty on outstanding college textbooks. PHOTO/LYNDA FERINGA
AMNESTY: Wairarapa College teacher Katherine Cronin is calling for a community-wide amnesty on outstanding college textbooks. PHOTO/LYNDA FERINGA
A Wairarapa College teacher is lamenting the perennial loss of classroom textbooks and has suggested book amnesty collection points beyond the school gates.
Katherine Cronin, who teaches English, social studies and tourism at the college, said textbooks were handed out as a crucial element for students throughout almost all subjectsand curriculums and "if you're lucky, you get a hundred per cent back".
"But chances are there are always going to be some that will never come back in. For example, we have a book called Hunter by Joy Cowley. It's out of print and if those books don't come back, what do we do next year?" she said.
The school purchased enough copies of any given volume to cater for at least two 30-student classrooms, Ms Cronin said, and there were several methods already used to get the books back home, including an amnesty box at the school, letters to parents and detentions for students who fail to return their copies.
She had been forced to track down and buy her own copy of Hunter from the UK-based Book Depository website, and there were no longer enough student copies left to allow two classrooms to study the novel at the same time.
The dwindling fund of textbooks is happening with every set in the school regardless of subject, she said, "and some of them, they just don't come back".
"I went in to the Salvation Army one day and there was a copy of a book that came from our school. It had a school stamp on it, so I paid for it to retrieve it.
"I'm speaking out of terrible frustration and I'm just wondering if there's something else we can do besides just having an amnesty box at school."
Ms Cronin suggested having book amnesty collection points at "grocery stores and banks" and other locations in the community, and books owned and issued by a given school could be recovered.
"I just want to see these books come back somehow," she said.
