Alabama District Adopts Web-based Textbook Management

• By David Nagel
• 08/29/08

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Baldwin County Public Schools in Alabama is moving its textbook management to the Web. The switch is designed to address the triple-digit growth forecast for the district over the next 10 years and comes on the heels of a $270 million capital improvement project.

According to the district, the extreme increase in student population was exposing major management and efficiency problems with its old management tools. The district moved to Follett Software's Destiny Textbook Manager.

"We're adding new sites each year, growing by leaps and bounds," said Textbook Specialist Sheila Geddie. "We needed to track textbooks to help control costs and enable us to transfer books from school to school rather than purchasing new textbooks every time someone needed one. We had a textbook program from another company, but it could not handle the variables, such as growth, that we needed to track. And it wasn't web based, so schools couldn't use it. We needed web-based flexibility in order for everyone to get a handle on their textbooks."

Textbook Manager is installed at the district level and is accessible to individual schools via the Web. It uses a single textbook database for the district, with textbook data updated at the time of checkout from any computer on the district's network that has a barcode scanner. Destiny Textbook Manager is part of Follett's Destiny Resource Management Solution, an administrative suite for K-12 districts.

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About the author:David Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education technology publications, including THE Journal and Campus Technology. He can be reached at [email protected].

Proposals for articles and tips for news stories, as well as questions and comments about this publication, should be submitted to David Nagel, executive editor, at [email protected].