The reaction to an Instagram photo of a dumpster full of textbooks outside a Toronto school was swift, with comments like “thumbs down,” “that’s not right,” and “Wow, glad you caught this.”

“These are Canadian history books,” said Nicholas Staudt, who took the picture outside Harbord Collegiate Institute on Harbord St. near Euclid Ave., Thursday night and quickly posted it. “Why are they sitting in a dumpster?”

The photo shows an overflowing bin of textbooks on Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and one called Canada Nation Unfolding. A more up-to-date version of it sells on Amazon for more than $90.

“What I was surprised at is there was no donation process,” said Staudt. “All I could think of was underprivileged areas and why these books aren’t given to those areas.”

The Toronto District School Board says it weeds out books regularly because they are either too old and the information out of date, or because they didn’t meet the board’s equity policy, which ensures that the language used isn’t discriminatory.

School libraries also regularly cull books, says board spokesperson Ryan Bird, to keep more copies of newer and more popular titles on the shelves.

But he says, “The books in there are being recycled. They have been replaced by new up-to-date content in the school. It’s more of a refresh.”

In the past, the Toronto board has looked into donating textbooks overseas, only to learn that shipping costs for an empty container start at $10,000 and go up, depending on the weight of the contents.

“Shipping something like that is cost-prohibitive,” said Bird.

The board tried five or six charities and was turned down by all of them. One told the board it didn’t take books older than two years.

“And if they’re not good enough for our students, we wouldn’t want to donate them to anyone else,” says Bird. “When it really comes down to it, that’s the fact.”

“I understand, to see it, that it looks odd. I get that,” he says, “but there is an explanation behind it.” The city says it recycles textbooks and residents can put them in their blue bins.

Christian Children’s Fund of Canada confirmed the information, saying that shipping textbooks to countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Paraguay and Nicaragua is too expensive. As well, the Canadian texts wouldn’t meet curriculum need in countries where English is not the first language.

Instead, the organization asks for donations to buy books overseas.

Still, says Staudt, there has to be a better solution than recycling, and that was the topic that dominated his dinner conversation later that night with a friend.

“I’m a pretty big bibliophile, so we both thought it was crazy,” says Staudt, who gives his books to friends, used bookstores or donates them to charity.

The west-end resident said although the black history books looked a bit dated, the Canadian tomes were in good condition.

“They might have replaced the books, but is there not a better solution for this?”

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