USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 13
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Nineteen hundred ten marked the end of the public school building program for the next thirty-five years. In
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the interim, to be sure, one or two rooms were added on to existing schools; St. Hedwig's Roman Catholic parish opened its own parochial school; and in 1916 the dilapidated, un- sanitary old schoolhouse in Union City was replaced. But the new Hop Brook School was a replacement rather than an additional building. The old building had no furnace and, like five other of the twelve public schoolhouses in the borough, had only privies instead of flush toilets. Further- more, it was significant that the new Hop Brook School was not built by the public but was erected and given to the dis- trict by one private citizen. When Harris Whittemore alone shouldered the cost of the new building his fellow citizens welcomed the gift just as they had when his father gave the Salem School and the high school to the borough. But except for the two tiny schools of outlying districts, from 1897 on the people of Naugatuck themselves never had to pay the bills for a new school.
While we must recognize the generosity that prompted these gifts, it is still necessary today to appraise the effect of this benevolent paternalism upon the borough as a whole. The perpetuation of the district system down to 1921 which made building in one district no affair of the residents of any other probably partly explains people's failure to realize that they were delegating to one family what was the re- sponsibility of the whole community. But whatever the basic reason, the fact remains that Naugatuck for nearly fifty years relied upon private philanthropy instead of public support for some of its most urgent public wants. The New England town that in 1844 demanded full local self-govern- ment had unwittingly let slip out of its grasp some of its former proud independence. When federal income taxes be- gan to make impossible the individual gifts of large sums of money and the borough was thrown back completely upon its own resources, the unaccustomed burden staggered the community. Gift of the Bronson B. Tuttle homestead to Nau- gatuck and its conversion in 1938 into a high school annex
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postponed for a few years the day of reckoning, but before World War II was over the school department was having to face a new situation, the need of more school space and only the public purse to finance it.
Members of the Board of Education did sense some of the implications of this situation, for in 1938 at their request the Superintendent of Schools made an analysis of public sup- port of education in Naugatuck compared with that in other Connecticut towns. His report, starting with a summary of the Whittemore family gifts, showed that Naugatuck stood midway between Connecticut's best and worst. Though per high school student the borough spent annually about $148 as compared to an average of $184 for all Connecticut towns, Naugatuck's ratio on school taxation to numbers of children attending placed this community among the top third in the state. But the fact that the School Board called for the com- parative data indicated that its members felt all was not well.
Mounting school expenses were not of course increased over the fifty-year period only by demand for more and bet- ter equipped buildings. A more extensive curriculum in both the grades and the high school meant a larger teaching staff, quite apart from the greater number of teachers re- quired to instruct the greater number of pupils. Offering drawing, music, domestic science, manual training, and physical education obliged the Superintendent of Schools to hire men or women qualified to teach these special subjects: Opening evening schools for illiterate adults or foreigners who could neither read nor write English added new costs to the school department's budget, as did the kindergartens started in 1898, and 1903. Physical inspection by school physicians and employment of a public school nurse also increased school expenses. After 1906 a truant officer had to be paid. Moreover, first in 1914, again in 1917, 1918, 1919, and 1920 salary schedules for teachers were raised. Set at $450 a year minimum and $700 maximum in 1914, by 1920, in order to engage competent people, the scale had to be set
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at $1,000 minimum and $1,600 maximum. Seven years later women high school teachers might be paid up to $2,000 and men as much as $2,500.
So appropriations for schools rose steadily, from $20,932 in 1893 to $57,870 twenty years later, and then with the jump in salaries to $192,150 in 1923. The figures in 1940 were set at $216,000. Where twenty-six teachers sufficed to teach about a thousand children in 1893, eighty-six teachers were employed in 1920 and eighty-nine in 1940 for about 2,420 and 2,367 enrollments respectively. Cost per child in relation to average attendance grew from $18.66 to $113.00 in fifty years. State law in 1911 required school certificates for children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen before permitting employers to hire them, and in 1920 stipulated a minimum of eight grades of schooling. Such measures brought school enrollment to new peaks, though in years gone by, whenever business depression brought a slackening of manufacturing activity to this industrial city, school attend- ance had automatically improved. Most noticeable was the effect of periodic decreased employment upon enrollment in the high school. When the new high school was opened there were 141 pupils registered; in 1916, 358, in 1918, 341, in 1920, 402; in the depression year of 1933 over 800. As was the case in every industrial community, the cost of operating the schools was always highest in years when the municipality amid business depression was least able to raise its budget. In 1932 the state set sixteen as the earliest age at which a child might leave school, and thus again the taxpayers' burden was increased. A falling birthrate during the depression years later reduced enrollment in the elementary grades but did not affect the high school before 1942. There the all-time high in attendance was 1,000 students reached in 1938-39.
Consolidation of the districts into a borough school system in 1920 helped to improve the standard of schooling, par- ticularly outside the Center, and was economical of both money and effort. That the borough was so tardy in accept-
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ing the unification is indeed hard to understand, especially in view of the urgency with which the School Board pleaded for the change year after year. A Superintendent of Schools for the whole borough was voted in 1903 and with the open- ing of the new high school a borough high school com- mittee. But when in 1905 the abolition of districts came up for vote, the freemen again rejected it, although the Board of Education pointed out that of 1,557 New England towns only eighty-four clung to the antiquated district scheme. Nine years later only fourteen towns, all in Connecticut, had refused consolidation. Naugatuck, for all its civic pride, was one of the very last to adopt the more efficient adminis- trative plan.
Notwithstanding this arch-conservatism and the somewhat penurious attitude of many taxpayers toward the schools, the education offered in the borough unquestionably broadened in scope and improved in quality as the years went on. Long tenure of office gave the superintendents accumulated ex- perience on which to draw. Frank W. Eaton held the post from its creation to 1918 and Harold E. Chittenden from that year to the present, a continuity which contrasted favor- ably with the rapid turnover in school principals which had characterized the preceding decades. Continuity of policy in the high school was further guaranteed by the long term of the principal appointed in 1903, Charles P. Slade, who served the school until 1945. Warmly supported by a suc- cession of interested men on the Board of Education, both superintendents introduced a series of sound changes over the years, revision of the course of studies, careful differentia- tion in grading, and more exacting standards of teaching.
In teaching music the borough schools were in the van. Singing was taught in most public schools in America be- fore 1900, but few towns developed so well rounded a pro- gram as Naugatuck where, it is possible, interest derived straight from the singing societies that early in the nineteenth century had played a large part in community social life.
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Or perhaps what Naugatuck schoolchildren achieved may be credited to the enthusiasm of William H. Miner, the Di- rector of Music in the schools for over twenty years. In 1925 he organized a school band and then a school orchestra, to both of which children and parents alike gave unfailing sup- port.
In the more strictly academic subjects also the school authorities offered a widening choice. For non-college pre- paratory students they set up a commercial course, at first beginning in the seventh grade and carried on through the high school years, later confined to a three-year high school course. After 1920 the high school limited its courses to three, a commercial, a general, and a college preparatory. The commercial course students inevitably outnumbered others in this mill city, but growth in the college preparatory classes was rapid, encouraged perhaps by a scholarship fund for assisting able boys and girls to go on to college. Before the end of the 1930's when overcrowding began to affect the amount of individual attention a student could receive, most Naugatuck children who could go at all went to college straight from the local high school.
The unity of social outlook this common schooling gave two generations of Naugatuck boys and girls was an asset the borough could ill afford to lose. In the classroom future mill executives and future clerks sat side by side. Adrian Greenburg, who was to become the famous Hollywood de- signer, Adrian, rubbed elbows with boys whose wives would never be able to aspire to more than a poor copy of an Adrian gown. The Engelhardt brothers, Nicholas and Fred, in later years both significant figures in the world of American edu- cation, studied their algebra and L'Allegro in company with contemporaries whose horizons would never reach beyond the Naugatuck valley. Themes written by future mill hands competed with essays of the future noted sports writer of the New York Herald Tribune, "Harry" Cross. George B. Hotchkiss, today head of a department of New York Uni-
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versity's School of Commerce and Finance, like Mary E. Wells, Vassar's distinguished mathematician, and Seth Bing- ham, composer and member of the Columbia University faculty, found companionship in Naugatuck schoolrooms with boys and girls destined to no special distinction. It was common public schooling of an invaluable order even if not of the very highest academic quality.
Unfortunately failure of the borough to expand the teach- ing staff enough to keep pace with the growth of the school population, and so to permit of the effective but more ex- pensive methods of individual teaching, gradually lowered the standing of the school. Cramped quarters and insufficient equipment for the numbers attending by the end of the thirties added to difficulties. After 1939 there came to be increasing dissatisfaction with the high school. Still it is conjectural whether proportionately more children than for- merly were sent away to college preparatory and finishing schools.
In the grade schools, the superintendents and teachers succeeded somewhat better in maintaining a comparatively high standard. Tests and promotions twice a year were de- creed in order to make grading more accurate and to en- able teachers to push along rapidly the gifted pupil at no loss to the plodders. Yet apparently in practice promotions came only once a year. In 1902 the so-called departmental system was introduced into the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, a sensible scheme which provided for each teacher's instructing in a special field instead of teaching all subjects of any grade. In 1914 the ninth grade was eliminated.
Professional standards for the teaching force were grad- ually raised. An experiment tried out at the end of the cen- tury whereby young women with no professional training were allowed to act as unpaid assistants in the schools was soon abandoned, and thereafter only persons with either normal school or college degrees were employed. In 1917 this practice became formal policy. Inasmuch as giving local
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women the first chance at any vacancy in the local schools was already customary, strictness about professional qualifi- cations was wise. But Naugatuck, like other New England communities, suffered from the tacit ban on the employ- ment of married women as teachers. So here, as elsewhere in America, the schools were staffed largely by unmarried women. Women teachers, conscientious, often uninspired, and, in spite of the occasional salary raises, underpaid com- pared to male teachers and to women in other professions, grew weary and old in public service. Yet women like Grace Cross, Mary King, Sarah Smith, and Josephine Maher in the grade schools, Anna E. Hopkins in the high school, and many others gave each successive generation of Naugatuck schoolchildren a solid elementary education and in some pupils aroused true intellectual curiosity.
Educating the children who attended school regularly was easier than forcing children to attend. Although in the 1870's the Center District had appointed a truant officer for several years, later his job was discontinued. Not until 1906 did the borough again act to curb truancy. The task was a trying one. Sometimes it was difficult to convince foreign parents that the public had any right to interfere with their send- ing their children to work in the factories, even though the children were under fourteen. When state law required evi- dence of a satisfactory amount of schooling for any child under sixteen who sought a work certificate and a later law stipulated that every such child must attend continuation school through the eighth grade, the problem became still more difficult. The truant officer's duties most often took him to the doors of the poorest families in town where the earn- ings of children as well as adults were badly needed. But his investigations soon brought to light the fact that not in- difference to schooling but lack of proper clothing kept many children at home. Discovery that there were tens of children without shoes to wear to school came as a shock to the borough. Donations of clothing collected by women of
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the churches or the Board of Charities helped, but stark poverty continued to play a part in reducing regular school attendance. The attendance officer consistently reported that voluntary truancy, unlike the cases in the 1870's, accounted for a small fraction of the total. Still, concerted effort by truant officer, Board of Education, teachers, church groups, and individuals gradually improved the situation, so that cases dropped from nearly 1700 in 1908 to about 375 fifteen years later. Temporary increase in truancy stemming from the evening schools in 1918-19 was in time also reduced.
Naugatuck's evening schools became, as years went on, one of the borough's chief services to its people. The first evening classes opened in the winter of 1899-1900 were overwhelmingly popular. Six hundred men and women reg- istered and average attendance was maintained at over 300, a record exceeded in Connecticut only by New Haven. In the next twenty years, however, this peak was not again reached. Enrollment rarely mounted to 250 people, and an average attendance of sixty was unusual. Classes were aimed at teaching English to men and women of foreign birth, though work in arithmetic, geography, and bookkeep- ing was also offered in some years, and for a short time man- ual training.
In 1916 when the war in Europe was threatening to in- volve the United States, the Board of Education made new efforts to promote the evening schools. The superintendent obtained from the federal Bureau of Labor lists of aliens ap- plying for naturalization and then made contacts with these foreigners to explain the help the public evening schools could give. At the same time The Goodyear's Metallic Rub- ber Shoe Company offered prizes for the best attendance in adult education classes, volunteered to pay fifteen cents an hour to every foreign-born employee who attended, and in 1919-20 together with the glove company employed teachers to give classes in English and in citizenship the year round. The local chapter of the D.A.R. also offered prizes. Enroll-
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ment in the public evening courses jumped to about 450 in 1920, partly because boys and girls under the age of sixteen who had not completed the eighth grade had to attend. But general community interest was aroused and in 1922 the School Board appointed a Director of Americanization. For neither employers nor private citizens wished the borough to have an unassimilated body of people in its midst who could speak no English. By 1930, fifteen per cent of the population still was unable to read English; so evening school classes went on. Nearly ten years later enrollment in the elementary classes in English was higher than ever before; 362 registered. Doubtless passage of the federal Social Secu- rity Act accounts for much of this increase, for the advantage of citizenship became plain. As late as the winter of 1944 there were 217 people naturalized as the result of this Ameri- canization program.
By 1933 elementary evening school courses were clearly not sufficient to meet all needs of adult education in the borough. That year consequently the Board of Education opened evening high school classes. The offerings varied from year to year according to demand. In the course of the next decade thirty-nine different subjects were taught, ranging from algebra and trigonometry to French and Italian. In the winter of 1938-39 over six hundred people were studying in the evening schools in addition to the 362 non-English speak- ing pupils, and twenty-two different classes ran all winter. Then as national defense plans got under way, vocational training began to play a larger part. Though typing, book- keeping, comptometry, and shorthand had for some years been taught as a matter of course in a city where big corpo- rations like the United States Rubber Company and the Bristol Company needed large office staffs, after 1939 more specialized industrial training was wanted. Machine equip- ment for full trade school training was out of Naugatuck's reach, and for this people had to go to Waterbury. But classes in shop mathematics, blueprint reading and mechanical
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drawing were attended by all ages and people of all national- ities in town.
In 1893 Naugatuck already had a polyglot population, and in the decades that followed the proportion of foreign- born dropped only slowly. To the Irish who had poured in for two generations, to the Germans and the English cutlery- makers who came after the Civil War, to the Swedish iron- workers, imported for work in the foundry, were added Poles, Italians, Portuguese, Russians and Lithuanians. The Yankee town of earlier years by 1910 had peoples of nearly every European nationality. About thirty-three per cent foreign- born in 1900 had become thirty-one per cent in 1930, nine- teen per cent in 1940. But in that year natives born of for- eign parentage still greatly outnumbered third-generation Americans.
Probably because few of these foreign nationality groups were large, the formation of distinct colonies was not usual, though the Italians tended to congregate along South Main Street, while the Poles and Lithuanians thronged Union City. But if these peoples did not live in mutually exclusive neighborhoods, they nevertheless did quickly organize na- tional societies, sometimes purely social, sometimes mutual benefit-Sons of Italy, Polish Falcons, Germania Maenner Chor, Knights of Maccabees, Order of Vasa Svea, St. George Lithuanian Society, and dozens of others, each usually with its women's auxiliary. Altogether in 1920 the Naugatuck Directory listed thirty-eight separate associations or clubs, in addition to twenty-six fraternal and benevolent societies. In 1928 a Rotary Club and in 1932 a Woman's Club appeared.
Not all of these groups of course were drawn on lines of nationality: Red Men, Odd Fellows, Sons of Veterans, the temperance societies, the Y.M.C.A., or the Young Men's Catholic Institute embraced members of widely different backgrounds. Their services in counteracting the influence of the still numerous saloons was particularly valuable. Of all these associations probably the Y.M.C.A. came to be the
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most all-inclusive. Started in 1895, it was not affiliated with the national organization and so was not bound to limit its membership by any religious dogma. The result was that Roman Catholics joined with Protestants in strengthening the Y.M.C.A., and the men who had started the Young Men's Catholic Institute in the seventies gradually transferred much of their support to the non-sectarian association. Priests and Protestant ministers alike promoted "Y" activi- ties. Men and boys of many creeds and all social strata came to enjoy its facilities; they congregated in its reading rooms, they played on its athletic teams, and after the opening of the new building, used its gymnasium and swimming pool. Unlike the "Y" in many towns, here it served as a true com- munity social center.
Important in the social structure though the fraternal societies and clubs were, they still were less basic than the churches. Puritans and Anglicans no longer dominated the religious life of the community, for three large Roman Catholic parishes, three Lutheran churches, a Methodist, and a National Polish church claimed far larger membership than Congregational and Episcopal. But rivalry between denominations withered away in the twentieth century, and was replaced by a rare spirit of co-operativeness. Not only was there none of the usual competitiveness between St. Francis Catholic church and the newer Polish Catholic St. Hedwig's or St. Mary's, there also continued to be every sign of the extraordinary mutual respect between Roman Catholics and Protestants that had characterized the nine- teenth century. When the school bus system was started, the School Board unquestioningly provided transportation for parochial school children as for public school children, a service flatly denied in many New England towns. Collabo- ration between priests and parsons marked every civic under- taking for fifty years. Only less noteworthy were relations between different Protestant churches. While they vied with each other in well-doing, it was a wholly friendly rivalry. The
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day of bitterness at a Brother's deserting the meeting house to join St. Michael's was gone. Furthermore, distrust of Episcopal ceremonial, of the vested choir, and the festive celebration of Anglican church holidays vanished as com- pletely as had the inquisitorial attitude in the Congregational fold that had once provoked such trials as Brother Scott's and Brother Byington's.
To a surprising degree Naugatuck adhered to the sim- plicity of earlier days in all that touched its spiritual life. Churchgoing on Sunday remained the accepted pattern of behavior for people of all faiths, although the coming of automobiles and the habit of making out-of-town weekend trips affected congregations here as everywhere else in Amer- ica. Attending mid-week prayer-meeting, however, gradu- ally faded out as an essential part of Christian living. In- stead members of every church dedicated time to social affairs which before 1890 would have been considered not properly the concern of a church at all. For example, in the early 1930's the Congregational church sponsored the Parish Players, a dramatic club, which staged plays once a month. Anyone over twenty years old in the whole town, regardless of religious affiliation, was invited to join. Ladies' Aid and Young People's societies, missionary groups, the Church Helpers, and others still carried on their good works, some- times, when hard-pressed to raise money by the usual fairs, lawn fetes, and church suppers, resorting to novel enter- tainments. One year the women of St. Michael's advertised a Jewel Bazaar where the jewels belonging to some of the Church Helpers would be displayed. "These," wrote Mrs. Adelbert Tuttle later, "proved to be about a dozen sweet little girls dressed in white, dancing around a Maypole, a most attractive sight, more precious than the diamonds, rubies, etc., that were looked for." But after 1915 activities like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts occupied a larger place in the churches' scheme of things. Proofs of the change in fundamental points of view about what constituted Chris-
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