Is having no text books common in elementary schools now?

[LWolf]

4. Even when we have textbooks,

they are simply a skeleton to start with when developing lessons.

But yes, it is common. My district has skipped the last two textbook adoption cycles; no money to buy new texts.

Since the last Language Arts adoption was based on student consumables and an online component, there is no actual "textbook." The district dropped the online component after a year, and it's been at least 4 years since they purchased any consumables.

Of course, when a new text book is adopted, they round up all the old books and get rid of them to force teachers to embrace the new adoption. So there are no OLD textbooks to fall back on.