Texas will spend more than $8 million in taxpayer funds to correct thousands of errors in the state-published Bluebonnet school curriculum, according to a contract obtained by a local news outlet from State Board of Education Vice Chair Pam Little.
The expense covers reprints, shipping, and disposal of outdated materials tied to text mistakes, grammatical problems, and image licensing issues, Little said, per Fox 4 KDFW.
“I just think that this is a cost that we really didn’t need to have,” Little said. “My background is educational publishing and never have I ever seen a program come with this many errors.”
The Texas Legislature approved the curriculum in 2023. It has drawn criticism because some lessons incorporate stories from the Bible.
The curriculum is not mandatory, but districts that adopt it receive $60 per student. Roughly one-quarter of Texas school districts use at least portions of the materials, which were published last year.
In February, the State Board of Education approved about 4,200 edits to the materials, which span roughly 2,100 components. The Texas Education Agency said about half of those were tied to teacher feedback or grammatical issues.
“In doing a little bit further research, it seems like 1,900 of them were actual errors, and 1,062 of those were licensing image issues, meaning that they used images that they did not have the approval to use,” Little said.
The remaining edits were updates or improvements based on teacher feedback, TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky said in February, per The Texas Tribune.
The TEA initially did not disclose the cost of the corrections. Under the contract, the $8 million total includes reprints, shipping, and disposal of the older text, Fox 4 reported.
“So that involved reprints, and the way the State of Texas works with these reprints is when there are errors that need [to be] corrected, updates, things like that, then the publisher is the one that covers that cost. Well, in this case, the publisher is the State of Texas,” Little said.
The State Board of Education is meeting throughout the week. Little said she plans to raise the cost issue with Commissioner Mike Morath on Wednesday.
“Just because I think it’s important that our taxpayers understand the costs that’s been involved in this,” she said.
