CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) — The Corpus Christi school district has spent about $90,000 on teaching materials that turned out to be peppered with misspelled words or were stamped with another school district’s logo.
The Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported Thursday that the vocabulary-based instruction cards, which also had grammatical errors, were distributed to Corpus Christi Independent School District campuses last spring. The cards also had sentence fragments and typographical errors, and some were stamped with the Edinburg Independent School District logo.
Nancy Vera, president of the Corpus Christi American Federation of Teachers, said that teachers can opt to not use the materials.
“Some teachers are using them, some (packets) are still sitting on the shelf,” Vera said. “It’s a significant amount for erroneous material. There are better ways to spend our tax money.”
District Deputy Superintendent Maria Luisa Guerra said that the discrepancies were dealt with when the errors were brought to the attention of district officials last fall.
“To my understanding, it was only a few cards,” Guerra said. “The direction to principals was to see what they had and recall the ones with errors.”
The errors did not deter Windsor Park Elementary School third-grade teacher Melissa Martinez. She says she did not ask for changes to the material, and that the cards have helped her students visualize math concepts.
When it comes to the errors, Martinez told her students that adults make mistakes, too.
“With any program there are editing errors,” Martinez said.