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A community improvement initiative run by parents in Lee County, Florida. We collect what families, teachers and students are actually seeing inside the district, check it against the public record, and publish both.

Lee County Committed Millions of Dollars to a New Core English Curriculum and the Books Never Arrived

The board committed $3,611,879.75 to a new core English program for grades six through twelve, on a five-year contract, in a one-minute public hearing at 9:11 p.m. on a Tuesday. School has been in session for two weeks. Principals are now telling staff the books are not coming. Our fact-check rides at the bottom, and it marks clearly what is confirmed and what is not.

By Amber Cebull and Ali Olivo · August 20, 2026

Lee County school principals told staff this week that the new English books are not coming to their schools. Students have been in class for two weeks. The board approved a 5-year contract totaling $3,611,879.75 on May 12.

They bought these books, created all this curriculum, and this week they told us that we’re going back to last year’s curriculum because they have NO IDEA when the books are coming and schools don’t have a budget to make copies of all the materials!

A Lee County teacher, in writing, August 20, 2026

We are still working to establish the scope of that contract and the reason for the nonperformance, and we have asked the district directly. What follows is not contingent on the answer. The record of how this purchase was made is complete, it is public, and it already contained every warning anyone needed.

On April 14, 2026, at 7:41 p.m., the chair of the Lee County School Board opened the public hearing on the instructional materials plan for English, intensive reading and personal financial literacy. He asked whether anyone in the audience wished to speak. The recording records the answer: “I’m seeing none.”

On May 12, at 9:11 p.m., three hours into the board meeting, the board opened the second hearing, the one that preceded the vote. Same question. Same answer. The hearing closed at 9:12 p.m. One minute. The board then approved $17,786,360.67 in English and reading materials by a vote of 7-0.

That figure is five line items spanning kindergarten through twelfth grade. The one that buys the new core English curriculum for grades six through twelve, the books principals now say are not coming, is $3,611,879.75. Every dollar figure in this piece is one of those two numbers, and they are not the same number.

Nobody used the hearing. That is the proceeding Florida law builds for exactly this purpose, and it was empty both times. The objections did get raised that night, by a teacher during general public comment two hours earlier and by two board members from the dais in the minutes before the vote. All of it landed outside the process designed to receive it, and none of it changed the outcome.

The notice told parents to review the materials on a date a year before those materials existed

Florida law requires the district to make instructional materials available for public inspection before it holds the hearing. The April 14 agenda item states when that happened: the materials “were made available for public review through placement on the District website on September 30, 2024.”

That date is wrong by a year. The identical sentence, with the identical date, appears in the district’s April 2025 hearing item for the Science curriculum adoption. It appears to be a clerical error, the result of copying and pasting. The district’s own timeline, presented to the board in January 2026, shows digital access to these English materials being provided on September 29, 2025, and publisher presentations occurring that October and November.

The one field in the record that tells a parent when they could go and look at the books was filled in with last year’s answer.

The objection deadline the board was given would have closed before the hearing was held

On January 13, 2026, the Chief Academic Officer laid out the schedule for the board in precise terms. A notice the following day. A formal public hearing on February 10. A final board decision on March 10. An objection form posted on March 11, with a deadline for community and parent submissions of April 10.

However, none of that happened. There was no February hearing and no March vote. The hearing was April 14 and the vote was May 12, each roughly two months later than announced.

Run the announced objection window against the calendar that actually occurred and it closes on April 10, four days before the public hearing took place and a month before the board voted. We do not know when, or whether, parents were actually given a window to object. That is a question the district can answer with a date.

The document filed with the vote was the previous year’s science item

Two PDFs are attached to the May 12 agenda item. The first is named “May 2025 Board Agenda Meeting.pdf.” Open it and the header reads May 06, 2025. The dollar amount reads $9,330,121.10. The recorded motion at the bottom is the 2025 adoption of Science materials from Savvas, McGraw Hill, Pasco and Cengage.

Its body, meanwhile, carries the 2026 English figures. It is a half-edited printout, produced on April 16, 2026, that contradicts itself from top to bottom. The live 2025 record in BoardDocs is clean, so nothing was altered after the fact. But the document filed alongside a $17.8 million vote is about a different subject in a different year.

The board was shown a reading figure half a million dollars too high

At the January workshop, and in that stray attachment, the cost of HMH Read 180 (for the district’s most struggling readers) is $2,649,300.00. In the item the board actually adopted, and in the adoption detail sheet, the same line item is $2,127,834.21.

The delta is $521,465.79. The arithmetic settles which is right: add the five component costs using the lower figure and they total the $17,786,360.67 the board approved to the cent. Use the higher one and nothing adds up.

Nobody’s name is on the English program Lee County bought

Florida publishes a bid report listing every submission in a state adoption, including an author field. For the four high school English courses, three publishers made the adopted list.

The elementary winner, Benchmark Education, lists nine named researchers with doctorates. The company Lee County chose for grades six through twelve put its own name in the author box.

The rest of that bid record is equally plain. Savvas, McGraw Hill and Benchmark all submitted Florida editions built for the state’s B.E.S.T. standards, carrying 2026 copyrights and titles that say so. ThinkCERCA submitted its national product with a 2024 copyright. The state classified the format as “Internet Based, Soft Cover.” Lee County is buying five years of that, so it will still be used in classrooms into the 2030s, having been two years out of date on the day it was approved.

A page of the ninth grade book is printed twice, eight pages apart

Sample copies of state-adopted materials are required to be available for public inspection, and a copy of the ninth grade student book turns up something a publishing house is supposed to catch. The page with the heading “When to Summarize, Paraphrase and/or Directly Quote Sources” appears on page 368. The identical page, same instructions, same three boxes, same bullets, appears again on page 376.

There is an innocent reading of that. Consumable workbooks do repeat a reference organizer across units, and a publisher would likely say so. But eight pages is close, and it is the kind of thing that gets found by anyone who opens the book rather than skims it.

Put it next to the author field and a pattern emerges that people inside Lee County classrooms have already named out loud: the material reads like it was assembled rather than written. We are not asserting that any of it was machine generated, and we have no way to establish that from the outside. What we can say is that the state’s own bid record shows no human being claiming authorship of this curriculum, that the book duplicates itself, and that teachers and parents are drawing the obvious inference. A publisher who thinks that inference is unfair can end it in one sentence by naming its authors.

Illinois revoked the publisher’s authority to do business there five months before the vote

ThinkCERCA operates from Chicago. The Illinois Secretary of State’s corporate record, file number 68563712, shows the company’s authority to transact business in Illinois was REVOKED on December 12, 2025 because the 2025 annual report was not filed. The registered agent is the company’s founder. The status has not changed since.

ThinkCERCA is incorporated in Delaware; losing an Illinois registration is not the same as ceasing to exist, and it is likely fixable by filing the overdue paperwork and paying the penalty. Companies let a state registration lapse for ordinary reasons, including closing an office.

What it does mean is that a company had roughly six months of escalating notice from its own headquarters state, did nothing, and was still in that condition when Lee County committed $3,611,879.75 to it for five years of digital licenses. Nobody at the district appears to have looked. The state’s protection if a publisher fails is a surety bond capped at $25,000, which is under one percent of what Lee has committed.

Lee County is the only district of any size in Florida that adopted this curriculum

ThinkCERCA’s Florida page carries a statement from its founder and chief executive. It names three districts.

We have been honored to serve Florida educators in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Palm Beach, and more over the years. We couldn’t be more excited about the Florida Department of Education’s adoption of our Florida Core English Language Arts and Reading curriculum for grades 6-12.

Eileen Murphy, founder and CEO, on ThinkCERCA’s Florida page

Palm Beach County has no record of ThinkCERCA. Not a contract, not an agenda item, not an attachment, in a board archive that runs back to 2009. In July 2025 Palm Beach adopted Benchmark for elementary and Savvas myPerspectives Florida for grades six through twelve, both 2026 Florida editions, and its public notice gave parents the street address where the books could be inspected in print.

Hillsborough County scored ThinkCERCA and rejected it. In 2024 the district solicited proposals for digital curriculum in grades six through twelve. Four voting evaluators, two executive directors, a principal and a director, scored five submissions against a published rubric. ThinkCERCA finished fourth at 42.00 points out of 100, against 74.00 for Imagine Learning, which took the award. Its weakest marks were qualifications and experience, 12.50 out of 25, and client references, 4.50 out of 10.

Two years later Hillsborough declined to hold a new English adoption at all. In April 2026 it extended the McGraw Hill materials it had adopted in 2021, print and digital, for four more years at $4,280,415.36 a year, on the stated grounds that its reading scores had risen three points and then four.

Pinellas County did buy ThinkCERCA, and never as a textbook. It is a supplement in ninth and tenth grade reading classes there, bought with referendum money. Pinellas paid $247,500 for it in 2023, $75,000 in 2024 and $73,000 in 2025. That last contract expired on June 30 of this year. The district has approved three purchasing agendas since, and ThinkCERCA is on none of them.

Twenty-three of Florida’s sixty-seven districts publish their full board records, attachments included, in a searchable public archive. Two of the twenty-three adopted ThinkCERCA as core English for grades six through twelve. One is Lee County. The other is Franklin County, on the panhandle coast, where the entire order covered 452 students and came to $71,412.09.

The printed book costs fifty dollars more per student than the online-only license

Franklin County’s order is worth reading, because it prices both versions of the same curriculum on a single form. A student license that is online only, good for five years, is $105.00. One printed copy bundled with those same five years of digital access is $155.03. Franklin’s board approved the online-only order on March 26 and the print bundle on April 30.

Fifty dollars and three cents per student is the difference between a curriculum a student can hold and one that exists only on a screen. The state classified what Lee County bought as “Internet Based, Soft Cover,” which describes both. Which of those two lines Lee purchased against $3,611,879.75 is answerable from one document, and the district has not published it.

Teachers are asking the same question in a different form. The books have not arrived, schools have been told to run last year’s curriculum instead, and they have no budget to photocopy the new one.

The purchase covers standard English classes and stops there

Florida adopts materials course code by course code, and the 2024-25 English list covers exactly twenty-four of them. ThinkCERCA is on it for English 1 through 4 and middle school Language Arts 1 through 3. It is on it for nothing else.

Every Honors English course in the state adoption drew exactly one bid, from Savvas, which Lee County did not buy. And no International Baccalaureate, Pre-IB or Cambridge AICE course code appears anywhere on the state English list. AICE English General Paper is course 1009400 and it satisfies a Florida English graduation requirement. Lee County offers Cambridge at eleven high schools and IB at four.

So the $17.8 million reaches the standard track. What the students in fifteen of the district’s high schools are using for English this month came from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is a blanket authorization the board approved on its consent agenda on October 7, 2025: up to $70,000,000 for bid-exempt instructional materials, textbooks and services, with no vendor list attached. No publisher serving those classrooms is named anywhere in the board record. We have submitted a public records request to identify the publisher of those materials.

Two board members raised the same objection minutes before voting yes

Board member Jada Langford Fleming had brought it up at the January workshop, asking staff to make sure “every material we are purchasing as a district is getting utilized and not sitting on a bookshelf.” On May 12, with the motion on the floor, she said it again:

I’m going to support this tonight, but I just want to reiterate one more time as a teacher, you know, we’ve adopted multiple curriculum over the years, and just to make sure that we’re utilizing every piece of material that is coming through on this price tag. Because, you know, I’m sure there are teachers in the room that can talk about workbooks that have sat on shelves, and for 5 years have an adoption and never opened up.

Board member Jada Langford Fleming, May 12, 2026

Board member Debbie Jordan followed, thanking the speakers who had come, and put a direct question to the Chief Academic Officer. She had checked with other counties, she said, and some of them were holding off this year for the reason Fleming had just given. Then she asked whether this was a one-year approval or a five-year one.

So, Dr. Shaker, I’m just looking to you. 5-year approval, 1-year approval? [Shaker] 5 years. Yeah. 5-year adoption, and we pay shipping on any materials. That’s all for the next 5 years.

Debbie Jordan and Chief Academic Officer Nathan Shaker, May 12, 2026

Sixty seconds later the board voted 7-0.

The board discussion, in full. Board member Jada Langford Fleming asks that the materials actually be used, board member Debbie Jordan asks whether the approval runs one year or five, and Chief Academic Officer Nathan Shaker answers five. The vote follows immediately. From the district’s own recording of the May 12, 2026 meeting.

Read that sequence again, because it is the whole story in miniature. Two members of the board named the exact risk, learned on the spot that there would be no revisiting it for five years, and approved it anyway. Nobody asked what the money buys for the honors and Cambridge and IB classrooms it does not cover. Nobody asked why the attached document was last year’s science item. Nobody asked why the review date was wrong. The questions were live in the room and the vote went ahead regardless.

Fleming’s worry is not a hunch, and it is not only hers. Florida Statute 1006.40(4)(a) requires each district school board to adopt rules and each superintendent to implement procedures that “maximize student use of the district-approved instructional materials.” It is a legal duty that the superintendent is responsible for, and it exists because buying books and not opening them is a documented way for districts to waste money.

The district can settle the question itself. At the workshop that same afternoon, staff told the board that one of the drivers of this year’s changes was “a comprehensive evaluation for our materials using state testing data and platform analytics.” They are already measuring whether teachers open the digital materials the county pays for. That measurement is a public record.

A Fort Myers High English teacher told the board it would cost a fraction to do it another way

Two hours before the vote, during general public comment, an English teacher at Fort Myers High School stood up and told the board what her department already does instead.

Her team, she said, has largely moved away from digital textbooks and teaches paper-based full-length works drawn from Florida’s own reading lists. Those texts are in the public domain and are free. Her figures to the board: roughly $1.3 million a year for the screen-based approach at the high school ELA level, against roughly $165,000 district-wide for open educational resources of the kind her school already uses, a difference of more than a million dollars a year. That school’s English department’s reading proficiency at 67%against a district average of 54%.

The district says it wants to achieve A-level performance, yet we are preparing to adopt yet another screen-based ELA textbook subscription. Despite this, we are told not to consider costs, only instructional effectiveness. My concern is that this program is neither the most effective nor the most efficient option.

Fort Myers High School English teacher, public comment, May 12, 2026

Her three minutes ran out mid-sentence. Another speaker tried to yield her remaining time and was told board rules do not allow it.

The public comment, in full. A Fort Myers High School English teacher addresses the board roughly an hour and forty minutes before the vote. Her time expires mid-sentence, and the speaker who follows is told he may not yield his to her. From the district’s own recording of the May 12, 2026 meeting.

A Lee County parent has been raising concerns to the district in writing since last year

The board member was not the first to raise it. A Lee County parent has been writing to the superintendent, the Chief Academic Officer and every board member about the same thing, and she buys the adopted student materials herself so she can follow along at home.

Her account, in her own words to the board, is that the consumables the district bought were on top of the desks at open house and then went unused all year, that the digital companions were never activated, and that instruction ran instead on Khan Academy, YouTube, “pdf fillable” worksheets pasted into Google Classroom from unvetted websites, and two separate AI-driven platforms. She names the materials by ISBN. She cites the same statute quoted above, and she is citing it correctly.

On August 3, 2026, a week before school opened, she told the board that the district’s own public curriculum maps still showed the previous publisher while the new English program was rolling into classrooms. The Chief Academic Officer replied the next day. His answer contained two sentences worth reading together. The first: “Thank you for noting that this portion of the website was outdated… We will remove the outdated Curriculum Maps from the website.” The second: “This is the first time we have heard this feedback.”

It was not the first time. She had raised it in earlier emails, in phone calls, and in person at the district’s curriculum committee before that committee was shut down. And the maps did come down. They are gone from the district website now. A parent reported that the public curriculum maps did not match the materials the board had adopted, and the maps were removed rather than corrected.

Among what she sent the board were screenshots from the district’s own May presentation. One of them is the table comparing this year’s resources to next year’s, and it contains a row the district labels “Technology Resource,” tracked alongside the board-adopted core. In the 2026-2027 column that row reads “Edia (9-12 Anticipated).” Edia is an AI math platform, and “anticipated” means it had not been approved. There is no board vote naming it. The parent’s complaint and the district’s own slide are describing the same thing from opposite sides.

The delivery risk was in the file before the vote

A district buying paper books from a century-old publisher is buying an object. If the company fails, the books are still on the shelf. Lee County bought something different. The state classifies this product as “Internet Based, Soft Cover,” and what the district purchased is five years of access, which exists only as long as somebody keeps providing it.

Every fact needed to weigh that risk was available on May 12 and none of it was raised. A publisher whose own state had revoked its authority to do business within Illinois five months earlier for not filing a form. A company with no disclosed funding round since 2017. An author field with no author in it. A state surety bond capped at $25,000 against a $3.6 million commitment, which is seven tenths of one percent. And a board told, sixty seconds before voting, that there would be no revisiting this for five years.

Board member Fleming worried the workbooks would sit on shelves unopened. That now looks like the optimistic version.

On August 20, 2026, as principals told staff the books are not coming, we called ThinkCERCA’s published phone number. It is answered by a recording in the voice of the company’s founder:

Hi, this is Eileen Murphy, founder and CEO of ThinkCERCA, with an important message. At this time we’re not able to answer your call, but we encourage you to use our live chat feature for technical assistance. For instructional support, please continue to email your dedicated success manager.

ThinkCERCA main line, recorded greeting, August 20, 2026

Plenty of software companies route support to chat and email, and on its own that recording proves nothing. Set it beside the rest and it describes the arrangement Lee County actually bought. Twenty thousand students, five years, $3.6 million, a program the state classifies as internet-based, a publisher that put no author’s name on it, and at the other end of the only phone number, the founder explaining that nobody is going to pick up.

Four documents would answer all of this

None of what is above requires anyone to take our word for it, and none of it requires a lawsuit. It requires four things the district and the state already hold.

And one thing that is not a document. The objection period should be reopened. Florida built that window so families could look at the books their children would be handed and say something before the money moved. In Lee County the notice carried the wrong year, the schedule the board was given never happened, and when the two hearings came, at 7:41 and 9:11 at night, no comments were made.

A 7-0 vote with no speakers at either hearing is not consent.

Fact check

Documented. Every factual assertion in the body traces to a public record, a state document, or the district’s own recording, and the disputed or uncertain points are flagged individually below rather than smoothed over. Two corrections were made during fact-checking and are noted because they cut against the piece: an earlier draft said the board voted without discussion, which is wrong, and the discussion is now quoted at length; and an earlier draft treated the public hearings as the only place objections could have been raised, when in fact a teacher raised them in general public comment the same evening. The remaining soft points are marked individually: the teacher’s cost and proficiency estimates are hers, and the Illinois revocation is limited to what the Illinois record actually says.

This op-ed is Amber Cebull’s opinion and it argues a side: that the objection window on this adoption should be reopened and the underlying documents published. It does not argue that ThinkCERCA is a bad program. Independent reviewer EdReports rated ThinkCERCA’s core curriculum “Meets Expectations” on all three gateways for all seven grades, and that is stated here rather than left out. Two people are unnamed by our choice. The Fort Myers High teacher quoted here spoke at a televised public meeting under her own name, so nothing about her remarks is private; we withhold the name because she is a current district employee and the piece does not need it. Her separate recorded interview with us is not used, because two claims in it did not match the record: she described the cost there as $17 million a year for five years, when the record shows $17.8 million as the year-one cost of five-year licenses, and her estimate of the savings was far larger than the one she gave the board. What she said at the podium is what appears here. A student is not used at all. The parent whose correspondence with the district appears here is unnamed by our choice, not hers; her emails are public records and she wrote them under her own name. No factual claim in the body rests on anyone’s account alone.

Checked Every claim was checked against a primary source rather than a summary. BoardDocs agenda items and their attachments were pulled directly from the district’s own API (the May 12 adoption item, the April 14 hearing item, the January 13 workshop item, and the October 7, 2025 bid-exempt expenditure item). The Florida Department of Education’s 2024-2025 K-12 ELA Adoption List, Short Bid Report, 346-page Detailed Bid Report, adoption Specifications and the One-Third Correlation form were read from the PDFs and spreadsheet themselves. Quotations from meetings were taken from the district’s own published recordings of January 13, April 14 and May 12, 2026 and are cited by timestamp below. The Illinois corporate record was read from the Secretary of State’s file detail page. Statutes were read from the Florida Senate’s published text. The board records of every other Florida district named here were pulled from those districts’ own BoardDocs archives by the same method, and the Franklin County depository orders, the Hillsborough tabulation and the Pinellas purchasing items are those districts’ own PDFs. ThinkCERCA’s Florida page was read from the page source, not from a summary of it.

ThinkCERCA’s Florida page names Pinellas, Hillsborough and Palm Beach as districts it has served.

Quoted verbatim from info.thinkcerca.com/florida, retrieved August 20, 2026, attributed on the page to founder and chief executive Eileen Murphy. The page’s headline claim is “Approved by the Florida Department of Education!” Read it precisely: the statement says the company has served educators in those districts, which is true of Pinellas, and it does not claim any of the three adopted the core curriculum. We do not read it as making that claim. It is quoted here because it is the company’s own choice of which Florida districts to put forward.

Hillsborough scored ThinkCERCA 42.00 out of 100 and awarded the contract to Imagine Learning.

From the board tabulation for RFP #24007-RFP-EST, Enhanced Digital Curriculum for Grades 6-12, attached to Hillsborough’s July 23, 2024 agenda item 2.02. Phase I totals: Imagine Learning 74, Connections Education 56.50, Edmentum 47.25, ThinkCERCA 42, Ereflect 40. Recommendation for award: Imagine Learning LLC. This solicitation was for enhanced digital and credit-recovery curriculum, not for a state-adopted core textbook, so it is not the same procurement Lee ran and the scores are not transferable to it. It is included because it is the only competitive, scored, published evaluation of ThinkCERCA by a Florida district we located.

Palm Beach County has no record of ThinkCERCA in its board archive.

The district’s BoardDocs archive was searched across meetings, minutes, policies, library items and attachments for ThinkCERCA, Think CERCA and thinkcerca.com. Zero matches. Seven documents match the bare string CERCA and every one is Spanish or Portuguese, including a Portuguese translation of Policy 5.186 and two Head Start monthly reports. The archive returns documents back to 2009. Palm Beach’s own adoption comes from its July 16, 2025 public hearing notice and the Attachment A finalist list adopted August 20, 2025.

Pinellas bought ThinkCERCA as a supplement, cut it, and let the contract lapse on June 30, 2026.

Three purchasing agenda items: 23-208-221, approved July 11, 2023, $247,500, term 7/1/23 to 6/30/24; 25-206-038, approved October 22, 2024, $75,000, term 10/22/24 to 10/21/25; 25-208-159, approved October 28, 2025, $73,000, term 8/1/25 to 6/30/26. The stated rationale on the last two is reading and skills practice in high school reading classrooms, purchased with referendum funds. The district’s Bridging the Gap mid-year report of March 24, 2026 lists ThinkCERCA as the Tier 1 intervention for ninth and tenth grade reading. The purchasing agendas of July 14, July 28 and August 13, 2026 were downloaded and text-searched; ThinkCERCA is on none. Absence from three agendas is not proof of cancellation, and Pinellas may yet renew.

Franklin County adopted ThinkCERCA for grades six through twelve, for 452 students, at $71,412.09.

Florida School Book Depository Review and Finish Document #230598, stamped APPROVED BY THE FRANKLIN COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD ON 04/30/2026, attached to that district’s ELA Instructional Materials Review/Adoption item. Student quantities by grade run 50, 65, 55, 75, 75, 82 and 50, totalling 452, at $155.03 each, subtotal $70,233.52 plus $1,178.57 estimated transportation. A separate order, Document #230636, approved March 26, 2026, covers online-only licenses at $105.00 per student and totals $49,310.62. Adoption expiry on every line reads 2030.

Of the twenty-three Florida districts with fully searchable board records, only Lee and Franklin adopted ThinkCERCA as core English.

The twenty-three are the Florida districts with a public BoardDocs archive that indexes attachments: Citrus, Collier, DeSoto, Escambia, Franklin, Gilchrist, Hardee, Hendry, Hillsborough, Lee, Marion, Martin, Nassau, Okaloosa, Osceola, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Putnam, St. Johns, St. Lucie and Taylor. Each was searched. This is not the whole state, and the piece does not say it is. Miami-Dade, Broward, Orange, Duval, Volusia, Brevard and others keep their records in systems that cannot be searched this way, so we make no claim about them. We claim what the searchable record shows, and we will publish any adoption a reader can point us to.

ThinkCERCA’s phone line is answered by a recorded message from its founder directing callers to chat and email.

Transcribed from a call placed on August 20, 2026. We publish it as what the line does, not as evidence that the company is failing. Routing support away from the telephone is an ordinary and widespread practice in education software, and a company can be entirely healthy and still not answer its phone. It is included because it describes the support arrangement a district of this size purchased, and because it is what a principal or teacher currently reaches when trying to find out where the books are.

Principals told staff the new English books are not coming to their schools.

DEVELOPING AND NOT YET CONFIRMED BY THE DISTRICT. This reached us on August 20, 2026 as an account of what principals communicated to staff. A Lee County teacher put the same account in writing to us that day, and is quoted in the piece: schools told to return to last year’s curriculum, no known delivery date for the books, and no school budget to copy the new materials. One profanity was trimmed from the opening of that message and an obvious typo corrected; nothing else was altered. That is one teacher and one account, and it does not establish scope. We have not established how many schools, which grade levels, whether the shortfall is print, digital or both, or the reason for it, and we have not yet received a district response. It is stated in the piece as what principals are telling staff, and it is not asserted as a district statement. Nothing else in this op-ed depends on it: every other claim below is drawn from board records, state records and the district’s own meeting recordings. If the district shows this to be wrong, this piece will say so at the top.

Nobody spoke at either public hearing, and the May 12 hearing lasted one minute.

April 14 recording at 1:45:49: “Is there anyone in the audience that would like to address the board regarding the approval of conduct a public hearing to receive comment on proposed 2026-2027 instructional materials plan, ELA, personal finance literacy, and intensive reading. So, anyone would like to speak? I’m seeing none.” May 12 recording at 3:15:57: same question, “Seeing none.” The chair states the hearing opened at 9:11 p.m. and closed at 9:12 p.m. One speaker did address the board that April evening, on a different hearing item, the student code of conduct.

The vote was 7-0 on $17,786,360.67, after discussion from two board members.

BoardDocs item DT7L99556EFD records the motion by Samuel Fisher, second by Debbie Jordan, and Yea votes from Fisher, Giovannelli, Ribble, Jordan, Persons, Fleming and Chaviano. The discussion runs from 3:20:34 to 3:22:02 on the district’s recording of the May 12 meeting, and the vote is recorded at 3:22:27.

Board member Jada Langford Fleming raised unused adopted materials in January and again immediately before the vote.

January 13, 2026 workshop recording at 1:20:16. May 12, 2026 recording at 3:20:36, quoted in the body. She identifies herself as a former teacher and says “I know I’ve touched on this before,” which is what allows us to attribute the January remark to her; the January automatic captioning renders the name only as “Miss Flo.”

Board member Debbie Jordan asked whether the approval was for one year or five, and the Chief Academic Officer answered five.

May 12, 2026 recording at 3:21:19 to 3:21:51. Jordan: “This is for 1 year, and I know that I’ve spoken to some of the other counties that they did not do this this year. They were holding off on that based on what Ms. Fleming just said as well. So, Dr. Shaker, I’m just looking to you. 5-year approval, 1-year approval.” Shaker: “5 years. Yeah. 5-year adoption, and we pay shipping on any materials. That’s all for the next 5 years.” The quotation in the body joins her question to his answer and marks the join.

A Fort Myers High School English teacher spoke during general public comment on May 12 and her time expired mid-sentence.

May 12, 2026 recording at 1:40:02 to 1:41:05, roughly an hour and forty minutes before the vote. A following speaker attempted to yield time to her at 1:41:12 and was told it is not permitted under board rules. She is named in the district’s own public record and on its published video; she is unnamed here only because she is a current district employee, and that is our editorial choice, not a condition she set.

Her cost comparison: about $1.3 million a year against about $165,000 district-wide.

Quoted from her public comment, where she prefaces it with “by my estimates.” These are a teacher’s own figures presented to the board, not district accounting, and we have not reconstructed them. Note that Lee’s adopted 6-12 ELA line is $3,611,879.75, so her $1.3 million appears to describe the high school band alone, which is how she frames it. We publish the estimate as an estimate.

Her reading proficiency figures: 67 percent at her department against a district figure she gave as 54 percent, down from 75 percent in 2009.

Quoted from her public comment. The trend line and the 2009 baseline are hers and we have not verified them against FLDOE assessment data, which changed instruments over that period in ways that make a 2009 to 2025 comparison difficult. Treat these as her characterization.

The April 14 hearing item gives the public review date as September 30, 2024, and the same date appears in the prior year’s Science hearing item.

Both items were pulled from BoardDocs and the sentence is identical in each. The district’s January 13, 2026 workshop deck shows “9/29 Digital Access Provided and Publisher’s Showcase” within a timeline whose other events run August through November 2025.

The schedule announced to the board on January 13 did not happen.

January 13 recording at 1:14:15 to 1:14:47: notice January 14, formal public hearing February 10 2026, board decision March 10 2026, objection form posted March 11, submissions deadline April 10. No ELA hearing or adoption item appears on any February or March 2026 agenda. The hearing was April 14 and the adoption May 12.

The objection window therefore closed before the hearing occurred.

This follows from the announced dates and the actual dates, and it is the reason the piece asks the district for the real dates rather than asserting them. It is possible the objection window was rescheduled along with everything else and simply never published. We have found no posting of a revised objection period, and we would correct this the day the district produces one.

The first attachment to the May 12 item is a self-contradicting printout of the May 2025 Science item.

The PDF, titled “May 2025 Board Agenda Meeting.pdf,” carries the header “May 06, 2025,” a Dollar Amount of $9,330,121.10, a body describing the 2026-2027 ELA plan, and a Motion and Voting block recording the 2025 Science adoption. Its own footer shows it was printed 4/16/26. The live May 6, 2025 record in BoardDocs was separately retrieved and is internally consistent, so the historical record was not altered.

Read 180 was presented at $2,649,300.00 and adopted at $2,127,834.21, and only the lower figure reconciles.

The higher figure appears on the January 13 cost slide and in the stray attachment, and was read aloud at the workshop. The lower appears in the adopted item and the adoption detail sheet. $9,772,107.75 plus $3,611,879.75 plus $2,127,834.21 plus $1,129,281.44 plus $1,145,257.52 equals $17,786,360.67 exactly. Substituting the higher figure yields $18,307,826.46.

The state bid report lists ThinkCERCA’s author as “ThinkCERCA,” while competitors list named authors.

From FLDOE’s Short Bid Report and 346-page Detailed Bid Report for the 2024-2025 K-12 ELA adoption. ThinkCERCA bids 1172 through 1178 all carry “Authors: ThinkCERCA.” Savvas lists “Kelly Gallagher et al.”; McGraw Hill lists Doug Fisher, Timothy Shanahan and Caitlin Tucker; Benchmark lists nine named authors with doctorates. The format field reads “Internet Based, Soft Cover” for ThinkCERCA and “Print Based, Internet Based, Print and Internet Based” for McGraw Hill.

Illinois revoked ThinkCERCA’s authority to transact business there on December 12, 2025 for failure to file its annual report.

Illinois Secretary of State file 68563712, THINKCERCA.COM, INC., a foreign corporation domiciled in Delaware, qualified in Illinois July 16, 2012. Status: REVOKED on 12-12-2025. Annual Report Year 2025; Annual Report Filing Date 00-00-0000. Under 805 ILCS 5/13.50(g) and 5/13.55 the Secretary of State issues a delinquency notice and revokes if the default is not cured within 90 days. Reinstatement is available under 5/13.60.

What the Illinois revocation does not establish.

It does not mean the company is dissolved or has stopped operating. Delaware is its state of incorporation, its Delaware registered agent remains Corporation Service Company, a paid commercial agent that a collapsing company would ordinarily be resigned by, and the founder maintains an active public professional profile. We have not obtained a Delaware certificate of status, which costs $20 and would settle it. Letting a foreign qualification lapse is common and curable, and a company that has closed an office has an ordinary reason to. The piece states this limitation in its own body and does not claim the company is failing.

The state surety bond for an adopted publisher is capped at $25,000.

Florida Administrative Code Rule 6A-7.0710, Policies and Procedures: “The surety bond amount is $5,000 per single item, $10,000 per series up to $25,000.” A cash deposit may be substituted at the department’s discretion.

No IB, Pre-IB or AICE course code appears on the state English adoption list, and every Honors English course drew a single bid.

The 2024-2025 K-12 ELA Adoption List covers twenty-four course codes. English Honors 1 through 4 (#1001320, #1001350, #1001380, #1001410) each list Savvas alone; the Short Bid Report records “# of Bids = 1” for each. Searches of both the adoption list and the Short Bid Report for “AICE,” “Cambridge” and “General Paper” return nothing. AICE English General Paper is Florida course 1009400 and carries English/Language Arts credit. Lee’s 2025-2026 Student Enrollment Plan names Cambridge programs at eleven high schools and IB at Cape Coral, Dunbar, Fort Myers and Riverdale.

The $70 million bid-exempt authorization.

BoardDocs item DLRLRT57DC9B, October 7, 2025, consent agenda: approval of expenditure for bid-exempt goods and services including instructional materials and textbooks, not to exceed $70,000,000.00, for October 7, 2025 through October 6, 2026. No vendor list is attached to the item. We do not assert that advanced-track English materials were purchased under it; we assert that the board record names no publisher for those courses, and that this is the authorization such purchases would fall under.

The board member’s quotation about materials sitting on a bookshelf.

The words are transcribed from the district’s own recording of the January 13, 2026 workshop at 1:20:16 to 1:20:38 and we are confident in them. We are not confident which member spoke, because the automatic captioning renders the name as “Miss Flo” and the same captioning calls board member Samuel Fisher “Miss Fischer.” The member is therefore not named. Anyone can watch the timestamp.

Florida law requires the superintendent to maximize student use of adopted materials.

Fla. Stat. 1006.40(4): “Each district school board shall adopt rules, and each district school superintendent shall implement procedures, that: (a) Maximize student use of the district-approved instructional materials.”

District staff cited platform analytics as a driver of this year’s changes.

May 12, 2026 workshop recording at 2:45:37: “a comprehensive evaluation for our materials using state testing data and platform analytics revealed the urgent need to prioritize the task that most significantly impact student growth.” At 2:46:37 the slide comparing 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 resources for grades 6 through 12 was summarized in a single sentence, without naming any publisher aloud.

The state specification requires roughly one third of the sample reading list and a filed correlation document.

FLDOE Specifications for the 2024-2025 K-12 ELA adoption: “For core Grades K-12 ELA courses, text from approximately one-third of the sample reading list should be incorporated into the instructional materials… Publishers are expected to provide a correlation document indicating the texts, excerpts or books from the sample reading list used in their materials per grade level as part of the bid submission.” The blank form, K-12-One-Third-Correlation.xlsx, requires a publisher to check each title and supply links to proof of coverage. Completed correlations are not published; this piece asks for ThinkCERCA’s.

The same full page appears at page 368 and again at page 376 of the ninth grade student book.

Verified from a photograph of an open copy showing both pages, headed “When to Summarize, Paraphrase and/or Directly Quote Sources,” with identical instructions, identical box headings and identical bullets. Under Fla. Stat. 1006.33(4) and the state adoption contract, sample copies are provided to the department and to every adopting district for public inspection, so this is checkable by anyone.

Whether the duplication is an error.

We do not assert it is. Consumable workbooks legitimately repeat a reference organizer across units, and that is the most likely innocent explanation. What the piece says is that the pages are identical and eight apart, and that the surrounding units would settle it.

The claim that the material “reads like it was assembled rather than written.”

This is an impression held by people who have read the book, and it is presented as an impression, not a finding. We make no claim that any part of this curriculum was generated by artificial intelligence. We have no method of establishing that from outside the company and we did not try. The two verifiable facts underneath the impression are that the state bid record lists the author as “ThinkCERCA” rather than any person, and that the book duplicates a page.

A Lee County parent raised unused adopted materials with the board, the superintendent and the Chief Academic Officer, and cited Fla. Stat. 1006.40(4)(a).

From her email chain of August 3 to August 6, 2026, addressed to the board office, the superintendent, the Chief Academic Officer and named board members. She cites the statute accurately; the text of 1006.40(4)(a) is quoted separately above. She identifies the materials she says went unused by ISBN. Her name is withheld here because she wrote to public officials about her own child, not for publication. Her account of what happened in her child’s classrooms is her account and we have not independently verified it.

The Chief Academic Officer wrote “This is the first time we have heard this feedback” and “We will remove the outdated Curriculum Maps from the website.”

Both sentences are quoted from his August 4, 2026 reply as forwarded to us by the parent who received it. His own signature block states that district email is a public record. We have not yet obtained the district’s own copy and a records request for the full chain is the correct way to close that gap before this claim is repeated elsewhere. The parent’s reply two days later states that she had raised the issue previously by email, by phone and at the district curriculum committee, which is the basis for the piece saying it was not the first time; that is her assertion, and the earlier correspondence would confirm it.

The public curriculum maps are no longer on the district website.

Checked directly against leeschools.net/our_schools/curriculum_standards on August 20, 2026. No curriculum map, pacing guide or scope-and-sequence links are present. We do not have a dated before-and-after capture of the page, so the sequence rests on the email exchange plus the current state of the site.

The district’s May presentation lists “Edia (9-12 Anticipated)” under Technology Resource.

Page 8 of the 35-page deck attached to the May 12, 2026 workshop item “District Strategic Priorities, Academic Updates for FY27.” The table compares 2025-2026 with 2026-2027 for grades 6 through 12. The Math section carries a “Technology Resource” row reading “ALEKS (6-Algebra), Edia (Algebra & Geometry)” for the current year and “ALEKS (6-Algebra), Edia (9-12 Anticipated)” for next. The header of that column reads “2026-2007,” a typographical error in the district’s own slide. On the recording the entire table is summarized in one sentence at 2:46:37 without any publisher being named aloud. We found no board item approving Edia by name.

ThinkCERCA’s independent review rating.

EdReports reviewed ThinkCERCA Core Curriculum for English Language Arts and Reading and rated it “Meets Expectations” on all three gateways for grades 6 through 12, in a report released March 20, 2025. That review covers the 2023 edition; Lee County adopted the 2024 edition. This op-ed does not argue the program is low quality.

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About the authors

Amber Cebull Amber is a Fort Myers native. Her two kids, 13 and 12, go to Cypress Lake Middle School. She grew up in Lee County schools herself: Tanglewood Elementary, Allen Park Elementary, Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School's Gifted Program, Fort Myers High School's IB Program. She graduated from the University of Central Florida with a B.A. in English Literature and a minor in Psychology. An entrepreneur for 15 years, she has owned multiple businesses in the Fort Myers area, including a marketing and business strategy consulting practice and a brewery in Downtown Fort Myers.

Ali Olivo Ali is a Fort Myers mom with two kids, 12 and 9. She has served on the Golden Apple Selection Committee for the Foundation for Lee County Public Schools and on the United Way Allocations Committee. She has more than 18 years of experience in corporate business, M&A, and law. She holds a B.A. from the University of Florida and a J.D. from Marquette University Law School.

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