BILL REQ. #:  H-3380.2 

Read first time 01/12/12.   Referred to Committee on Education.

     AN ACT Relating to public access to instructional materials used in public schools; and amending RCW 28A.320.230.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON:

Sec. 1   RCW 28A.320.230 and 1989 c 371 s 1 are each amended to read as follows:
     Every school district board of directors, unless otherwise specifically provided by law, shall:
     (1) Prepare, negotiate, set forth in writing and adopt, policy relative to the selection or deletion of instructional materials. Such policy shall:
     (a) State the school district's goals and principles relative to instructional materials;
     (b) Delegate responsibility for the preparation and recommendation of teachers' reading lists and specify the procedures to be followed in the selection of all instructional materials including text books;
     (c) Establish an instructional materials committee to be appointed, with the approval of the school board, by the school district's chief administrative officer. This committee shall consist of representative members of the district's professional staff, including representation from the district's curriculum development committees, and, in the case of districts which operate elementary school(s) only, the educational service district superintendent, one of whose responsibilities shall be to assure the correlation of those elementary district adoptions with those of the high school district(s) which serve their children. The committee may include parents at the school board's discretion: PROVIDED, That parent members shall make up less than one-half of the total membership of the committee;
     (d) Provide for reasonable notice to parents of the opportunity to serve on the committee and for terms of office for members of the instructional materials committee;
     (e) Provide a system for receiving, considering and acting upon written complaints regarding instructional materials used by the school district;
     (f) Provide free text books, supplies and other instructional materials to be loaned to the pupils of the school, when, in its judgment, the best interests of the district will be subserved thereby and prescribe rules and regulations to preserve such books, supplies and other instructional materials from unnecessary damage.
     Recommendation of instructional materials shall be by the district's instructional materials committee in accordance with district policy. Approval or disapproval shall be by the local school district's board of directors.
     Districts may pay the necessary travel and subsistence expenses for expert counsel from outside the district. In addition, the committee's expenses incidental to visits to observe other districts' selection procedures may be reimbursed by the school district.
     Districts may, within limitations stated in board policy, use and experiment with instructional materials for a period of time before general adoption is formalized.
     Within the limitations of board policy, a school district's chief administrator may purchase instructional materials to meet deviant needs or rapidly changing circumstances.
     (2) Establish a depreciation scale for determining the value of texts which students wish to purchase.
     (3) Make available to the public in a single location determined by the board, such as a school library, a complete set of the textbooks, pamphlets, workbooks, and other instructional materials, including online materials, used for instruction in each classroom in each school in the district. The board of directors must also list each of the names and publishers of textbooks and other instructional materials used in the schools on the district web site. The hours of availability and location of the collection must be clearly displayed on the web site. It is the intent of the legislature that a copy of all instructional materials be available for viewing by the public during regular school hours, and therefore materials may be restricted to on-site inspection only.