Education: Priorities v. Schools

This month 31,566,000 U.S. citizens, big & small, go to school—160,000 fewer than last year. Despite this record decline in total school population (resulting from the declining birth rate), school officials in Washington last week bemoaned the worst overcrowding of schools in U.S. history. Reason: a major shift of the population to defense-production centers.

Cases in point are Omaha and the District of Columbia. Omaha schools have a seating capacity and normal enrollment of 6,000; this month, thanks to a new Glenn Martin plant, they have 7,778 additional pupils and no place to put them. Washington has at least 7,000 newcomers. If they were spread over the city, there would be plenty of room, but they are concentrated in the southeast section, near the Navy Yard. Result: school officials last week planned to teach in storerooms, gymnasiums, basements, nine old portable schoolhouses resurrected from World War I. They also decided to run schools in morning and afternoon shifts, cutting short each pupil’s day by one hour and 45 minutes.

Throughout the U.S., some 329,000 children were in a similar fix. The Federal Office of Education estimated that 200,000 would crowd into present or makeshift classrooms. The remaining 129,000 would have to get their education in tents or portable houses, or go without schooling.

Besides the classroom shortage, there was a teacher shortage in defense centers. In Washington, confusion was further confounded by a shortage of school janitors, many of whom had quit for defense jobs.

Anticipating this crisis, Congress had passed the Lanham Act, appropriating $150,000,000 for schools and other public facilities in defense centers (TIME, July 14). But the schools ran into all sorts of priorities and bottlenecks. The Federal Works Agency, in charge of the fund, gave first call to water and sewers. Of 600 emergency schoolhouses applied for, only 29 had final approval last week and none was yet under construction.

Screwiest mixup was in Baltimore, where the voters had authorized a $10,000,000 bond issue for new schoolhouses in May 1939. But dawdling Mayor Howard W. Jackson, having spent less than $100,000 of it, seized upon national defense last week as a pretext for halting school construction altogether. His excuse: building costs were high; labor and steel were scarce; it would be better to spend the $10,000,000 after the emergency to relieve unemployment. Informed of the mayor’s action at a press conference last week, youth-minded Eleanor Roosevelt exclaimed: “Horrible!”

Meanwhile, without batting an eye, Mayor Jackson admitted that although he refused to spend the city’s money he had applied for $875,000 under the Lanham Act to build schools.