The Duval County school system expects to save around $10 million over the next two years by switching from traditional textbooks to free, online courses for elementary math and reading classes.
Duval County Public Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti says he recommended the courses called Engage New York because they’re better aligned to new Common Core standards than the textbooks the district was going to buy.
“This curriculum was created by the same creators of the common core standards,” said Vitti. “So the state of New York used Race-to-the-Top money and they commissioned these curriculum writers to develop curriculum to better help their teachers and students perform on the new standards.”
Vitti says the cost of printing out Engage New York materials for students and teachers will be around $3.5 million compared to the $13.2 million the district was prepared to spend on new textbooks.
The Duval County School Board adopted Engage New York last week as the main reading and math curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade.
Corrected: A previous version of the story referred to the courses as a "curriculum."
