USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Ipswich > Town annual report of Ipswich 1946 > Part 8
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Frederick P. Pickard returned in March, 1946, to the school after serving three years in the armed services. Mr. Pickard was assigned to teach social studies and mathematics in the
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junior high school grades. He was also appointed to supervise the work of the pupils in Grade VIII and to integrate their program with that of the High School.
John J. Bochynski, a resident of Salem, graduate of Temple University, where he received his varsity letter in football, a veteran of the first Marine division, was appointed in Septem- ber to teach in the High School and direct the program of boys' physical education. Mr. Bochynski also directed the sum- mer playground program.
Kendall M. Tilton, a graduate of Ipswich High School and Bates College, who taught at Cummington, Massachusetts, and at Traip Academy, Kittery, Maine, before entering the armed services, was engaged in September to teach the sciences at the High School.
Anne W. Drury, a graduate of Tufts College, class of 1946, a major in English, was engaged and assigned to the teaching of freshman and sophomore English at the High School.
Barbara A. Mackenzie, a graduate of Ipswich High School and of the State Teachers' College at North Adams, class of 1946, was engaged in August and assigned to Grade V at the Burley School.
Violet H. Kelley, who had taught during the school year, 1945-1946, in the public schools of Wakefield, and before that for eight years in the schools of Stewarts, New Hampshire, was engaged by the School Department in September and assigned to Grade I at the Winthrop School.
Cecilia Z. Mackenzie, a graduate of Salem Normal School, and holder of the B. S. in Education of Boston University, School of Education, was engaged in August and assigned to Grade VI at the Burley School.
At present there are two vacancies in the school organiza- tion, created by recent resignations. These have not as yet been filled by Committee appointment.
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Besides the changes in teaching personnel referred to above, I wish to record also the following changes in staff:
Ruth E. Garrett, who had been acting school nurse, resigned November 1, 1946. Beatrice E. Collins was engaged to fill the vacancy.
Charles J. Kemp, who had been for three years custodian of the Shatswell School, resigned in August. He was replaced by Warren E. Grant, who had served as custodian of this school for a period of fifteen years before the war.
GENERAL SALARY INCREASE
This turnover in teachers is the result of an accelerating trend. During the past three years there have been, out of a total of 44 teaching positions in the School Department, twenty- nine changes in teaching personnel, occasioned by resignation, death, or failure of reappointment. And the end of these changes is not yet. I am informed by the State Supervisor of Elemen- tary Education that there will be fewer than 150 graduates from our Teachers Colleges this year to supply teacher replacements for the 351 towns and cities in the Commonwealth. The com- petition to secure these graduates will obviously be keen.
As of the date of this report our present maximum salary for teachers who have a degree is $2350 a year; for those with- out a degree, the maximum salary is $2000 a year. The differen- tial between the maximum and the minimum in many positions, at least, is negligible.
These salaries are inadequate to attract and hold teachers against the blandishments which other communities can offer, which are no better able to pay than Ipswich. In fact, they represent, in purchasing power, something between $300 and $500 less than the maximum salaries paid in Ipswich in 1940.
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To close that gap and to place Ipswich in a favorable com- petitive position with relation to communities of similar financial assets and education responsibilities are the compelling factors leading to the recommendation of an immediate general increase in teachers' salaries.
SALARY SCHEDULE REVISION
Beyond that immediate emergency step, it is necessary to give thoughtful consideration to the revision of the salary schedule upward. Under present economic conditions, at least, it is not unreasonable to assume that an adequately trained and competent teacher of fifteen years' experience - who has, at periodic intervals and at his own expense, continued his train- ing with courses at recognized universities, relating to the problems that confront us specifically in our schools - should expect to attain to a maximum of $3000 a year.
We should be concerned with engaging teachers who have competence in their particular teaching field and who have also breadth and scope in relation to matters of general culture. But beyond that, we must devise a schedule which will give encouragement to a continuing in-service training over which the School Department shall have a large measure of control.
Our aim should be to acquire not necessarily a teaching force which has in the past accumulated a variety of degrees; but rather one which is alive to our particular educational problems, and which is able to bring to the solution of our problems the best current thought to be gained from organized study and professional association. It is with that end con- tinuously in view that the salary schedule should be revised. .
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STATE AID FOR EDUCATION
It may be that such a long range program will have to be deferred until our state government accepts the responsibility for equalizingeducationalopportunities throughout the state, by providing for aid to education from funds derived from sources other than real estate taxation. If this be so, State Aid for Education is for us a matter of utmost urgency; and our legis- lators should be so advised.
THE "EQUAL PAY" LAW
At the Annual Election in March, 1946, the Town voted by an overwhelming majority to accept the law providing for equal pay for men and women teachers doing the same type of work and teaching in the same grades with similar experience and training. The interpretation of this law and its application to our local salary schedule was thoughtfully studied. A special Town Meeting was called in June, 1946, at which the School Committee made a recommendation that the salary rates of all women teachers in Ipswich be raised $350 a year to conform with the spirit and the letter of the law.
The Town Meeting appropriated from surplus revenue the sum of $4,480.00 for this purpose.
LONG RANGE SCHOOL PLANT PLANNING
The Annual Report of the School Committee for 1945 was devoted entirely to the discussion of a long range, school-plant planning program for the Town of Ipswich.
In that report, our present school organization was de- scribed, and the future enrollment in the schools was estimated. Our present school plant was evaluated in terms of good edu- cational and administrative practices and of the community's
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needs. It was suggested that a possible course of development of our school plant might be in the ultimate further consoli- dation of our elementary schools, and in the extension of our High School plant (making it a six year high school) by pro- viding larger assembly and recreation facilities for use by the public at large and for school activities.
The problem of financing such a program of plant im- provement was touched upon. Emphasis was placed upon the need for integrating the program with an overall plan for com- munity beautification and public service improvement. Those interested in the details are referred to that report.
Aware of the present limitations on construction, and of the added burdens of cost to be borne by the community in supporting normal services, the Committee entertained no idea that a construction program could be immediately em- barked upon. They felt it no less a part of their obligation, however, to acquaint themselves with the inadequacies and strengths of the schools, and to find, if possible, in the solution of the schools' programs, a means of satisfying other more general community needs. That funds; other than those raised by real estate taxation, might yet be available for public welfare con- struction gave added impetus to the study.
A sub-committee of the School Committee was, therefore, appointed to consider the program; and several School Com- mittee meetings were devoted to the consideration of their findings. It was finally voted to request the State Commissioner of Education to appoint a committee to survey the Ipswich Schools, with particular reference to the ideas developed by the Committee with the Superintendent in the report of 1945.
The Commissioner has granted the request and has ap- pointed to the Committee Mr. A. Russell Mack, Deputy Com- missioner of Secondary Education for the Commonwealth, and Miss Alice B. Beal, State Supervisor of Elementary Education.
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This State Committee is presently surveying the schools. Its conclusions and recommendations will be publicized when they have been received by the School Committee.
PUBLIC USE OF THE HIGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM
When the American Legion, representing a number of vet- erans in the community, made application for the use of the High School to promote a program of recreation in which basket- ball would be the focus of their winter-time interest, the School Department was constrained to give its best thought to the restudy of the problem of allowing the school facilities to be used for activities other than those initiated and supervised by the School Department.
After a study of procedures employed over a period of years by many communities, it was voted that the High School auditorium, gymnasium, cafeteria room, and auxiliary facilities, only, be opened to properly qualified organizations at such times as do not conflict with the school program, and at the discretion of the School Committee.
Though the building was built by all taxpayers, it is not necessarily incumbent upon all of them, it would seem, to support, through general taxation, activities which properly come under the aegis of private organizations. A schedule of fixed charges, which will be impartially adhered to, covering a share of the cost of maintaining, heating, lighting, and sup- porting the properties was, therefore, evolved. A set of regu- lations designed to protect the properties and prevent their being subverted to uses other than those for which they are primarily intended were devised. The schedule of charges and the regulations for use of the properties are appended to this report.
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SCHEDULING OF USE OF HIGH SCHOOL
The problem involved in scheduling the many diversified activities to. be held in our auditorium-gymnasium is pointed by the following schedule of activities to be conducted in the gymnasium-auditorium during the typical week of February 4. Monday -
8:45-10:50 Boys' Physical Education Classes
10:50-11:35 Girls' Physical Education Classes
11:45-12:10 Noon dancing and social period
12:10- 1:25 Girls' Physical Education Classes
1:30- 4:00 Boys' Varsity Team Practice
4:00- 5:30 Girls' Varsity Team Practice 7:30-10:00 Greek Young Men's Club - Basketball Game Tuesday-
Same as above to 1:30
1:30- 4:00 Junior Class Play Rehearsal
4:00- 5:30 Freshman Boys' Practice
3:00 Girls' Team Assemble to play Beverly Away 7:00-10:00 Ipswich (Boys') First and Second Teams vs. Hamilton
Wednesday -
8:00- 8:45 Assembly - All Classes
8:45- 1:30 Same as Monday
1:30- 2:45 Eighth Grade and Freshman Girls - Basket- ball Practice
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2:45- 5:30. Boys' Varsity Team Practice 7:30-10:00 Practice - Post 80, American Legion
Thursday -
8:00- 1:30
Same as Monday
1:30- 2:30 Girls' Varsity - Practice
2:30- 5:30 Boys' Varsity - Practice
7:00-10:30 Student Council Activity
Friday -
8:00- 1:30 Same as Monday
1:30- 4:00 Junior Class Play Rehearsal
4:00- 5:30 Seventh and Eighth Grades - Games
3:00 Ipswich vs. Topsfield (Girls away)
7:00-10:00 Ipswich vs. Lynn Vocational (Boys)
Saturday - 7:00-10:00 American Legion Basketball Game
THE MANNING SCHOOL BUILDING
The Committee has considered carefully the possible dis- position of the Manning building, which was abandoned as a school three years ago. It is not adaptable to use as a modern school building. It will not be used for that purpose in the future. As long as the Winthrop School continues to be used, however, the land on which the Manning School rests will be a necessary part of the playground area of the Winthrop School.
The School Committee felt, therefore, that the Manning School building should ultimately be removed from the site, or torn down. The Committee feels that because of the scarcity of building materials, the time for such action is now. An article has. therefore, been inserted in the Warrant for the Annual Town Meeting to authorize the School Committee to proceed with the task.
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IPSWICH SCHOOL REPORT 1 THE HIGH SCHOOL PLAYING FIELD
For a period of time antedating even the construction of the present High School building, the playground area at the High School has been in the process of growing. Most of the area which is the playing field is filled land, much of it, the result of public dumping of trash. The dump, the Committee has been informed, will be closed this spring. The Committee is, therefore, requesting an appropriation at the Annual Town Meeting to rough-fill that section of the field which has most recently been used as a dump. At a later date, after settling has occurred, the Committee will request an appropriation to complete the grading and planting to the ledges by the river.
VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE AND EDUCATIONAL TESTING
In order to keep teachers and administrator more reliably acquainted with the educational development of each pupil in the secondary school grades, the Iowa tests of Educational Development, evolved by the Chicago Research Associates, have been administered to all pupils, Grade IX through Grade XI, during the past two years. This year all the pupils in Grade XI and certain selected pupils in Grade XII were tested.
The areas explored by these tests are as follows: Social Studies Background, Natural Science Background, Reading in the Social Studies, Reading in the Natural Sciences, Literature, Correctness in Writing, Quantitative Thinking, Uses of Sources of Information, and General Vocabulary.
The information derived from this testing has been sup- plemented by a series of tests for educational and vocational guidance, devised and administered by the Boston University School of Education, Cooperative Guidance and Testing Service. This year, as in the past, pupils early in their junior year in
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High School have been given this test. The record of each pupil's performance has been tabulated by the examiners and submitted to the school. Conferences have been held between the professors in charge of the testing service and those in our schools who will use the tests as a basis for educational guidance in conferences with the pupils.
In the spring of this year, as last, all the pupils in Grade VIII will be tested. The Boston University service has been engaged to give prognosis and diagnosis tests, the results of which will be used as a basis for guiding these pupils in the choice of their high school courses.
These batteries of tests, designed and scored by outside agencies, have been supplemented by a rather elaborate pro- gram of diagnosis testing of the results of the instruction in the English language. The teachers of the English Department of the High School have administered these tests, have scored them, and are presently analyzing the results - as a starting point for a re-examination of the course in English. .
THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND THE HARVARD REPORT
The accumulated data resulting from these activities will be available to a committee of teachers working with the High School principal to evaluate our course of study in the light not only of our peculiar problems, but of educational practices which are general to this area and to the country at large.
A stimulus to this activity has been furnished, certainly, by the publishing, during the past year and a half, of at least three important studies of proposed plans for curriculum re- form: the now famous Harvard Report; The Study of the Edu- cational Policies Commission, Education for All American Youth; and the Fortieth Annual Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
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We in the schools have read these at the time of their publication with more than cursory interest; and we have had occasion as time has passed to refer again and again, particu- larly to the Harvard Report. We find it fascinating reading: provocative, wise, and not infrequently distinguished by a light- ness of touch which is hardly to be expected of scholars dealing with a ponderous subject like General Education.
"From her opening day (says the reporter in Chapter 5) Harvard has included a large number of young men who had no professional intentions. They have been complained of by their preceptors, these three hundred years. They have com- mitted every sort of folly and extravagance. New colleges such as Williams and Amherst have been founded in order to pro- vide a place where poor but pious youths could be educated for the ministry, uncontaminated by the "rake hells," "bloods," and "sports," of Harvard - and the same class of students have Hocked to the new colleges. Even after countless examples of gentlemen who have become scholars and who have become gentlemen by this illogical commingling, there are some people who would admit none to our colleges but serious students, and others who would set a standard of luxury and expense impos- sible for poor students. So long as Harvard remains true to her early traditions, rich men's sons and poor, serious scholars and frivolous wasters, saints and sinners, puritans and papists, Jews and Gentiles, will meet in her Houses, her Yard, and her athletic fields, rubbing off each others angularities, and learning from friendly contact what cannot be learned from books." Thus amusingly, the Harvard reporter gives the lie to those who would divert the college from the task of liberal, general education to that of specialized training of a class.
The writers of the Harvard Report take cognizance of the change that has taken place in the American secondary school in the past three generations. In 1870, they point out, the high school was almost exclusively a preparatory school for
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college; today it aims to prepare the children of all the people for life. Thus, while our population has increased during the last seventy years but slightly more than three times, the enroll- ment in the high schools has multiplied ninety times, and that of the colleges, thirty times.
The Report finds ample justification for this trend, and accepts the moral obligation, implicit in the idea of democracy, that the good life and the education which trains the citizen for the good life are equally the privilege of all.
The writers take issue with those who, recognizing the great differences that exist as between individuals, would at too early a stage make education almost wholly an exploitation of indi- vidual interests by emphasis upon those subjects which divide man from man according to their particular functions, to the exclusion of those which unite man and man in their common humanity and citizenship.
As against this tendency the reporters recommend what they believe should be a common core of subject matter for all pupils who are to be educated in our society. Toward this end they recommend English, Science, and Social Science. In English, emphasis is placed not only upon literature but upon interpretative speech and vocal reading, as well as upon the never ending discipline of developing some facility of expres- sion. The suggested focus of the social studies program in the ninth or tenth grades would be European history or general his- tory and geography, to be followed in the eleventh or twelfth grades with a sequence dealing with American history and the problems of American life. In science, emphasis is placed upon developing in the student some appreciation of what is known as the scientific spirit and method of accumulating knowl- edge - of doing, in other words, that one may know, rather than doing primarily with other ends in view.
In the ninth or tenth grades, second to a course in general science, biology is suggested as taking precedence over courses
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in other sciences, both because the student's stage of intellec- tual maturity is better suited to the subject matter of biology, which can be dealt with largely in a descriptive way; and be- cause the content of this course is more intimately related to his daily experience and educational needs.
Though the writers of the Harvard Report would find a course similar to that described above desirable for all pupils, it is not to be assumed that the techniques of presentation and the scope of the classroom exercises would be the same for all the pupils or all the classes assigned to the courses. These would have to be adjusted to what passes for the intelligence of the child and to the whole complex of surroundings which help to shape a child's view of the world and his place in it.
In addition to a fulsome discussion of that which should constitute the common core of the secondary school program, the Harvard Report has much to say of the possible elective subjects in the program; the languages, including much maligned Latin; the Arts (fine and practical), and mathematics. For all who have the aptitude - whether they intend going to college or not - four years of mathematics are indicated. Though recognizing the disagreement and confusion that exists over the role of foreign language in secondary education, the Re- porter affirms that language should be a part of the secondary school program for those who would use it as a tool, and for those (perhaps few) for whom language is the opening of doors in the way of poets and writers or as regards culture in the way of historians. The Report further restates, briefly but none the less formidably, the time-honored argument that the stu- dent who studies Latin will bring to his study of English an experience in syntax and a sense of root meanings which are enormously to his advantage in English. The Report suggests, however, that the study of Latin should come early rather than late in the secondary school course.
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One of the fallacious threads which runs through much of our present day philosophy of secondary education is the as- sumption that because some pupils are unable to profit from the college preparatory course in high school, nobody shoulel take it unless he were going to college. The Harvard Report tends to expose that fallacy. It substantiates the often repeated observation of our high school principal that no other offering which the high schools make will pay the same dividends in living that the college preparatory course will.
And yet such an academic program, while good for many people, cannot meet the needs of all. Many of the pupils who leave our secondary schools are manual in their abilities, and if they are to be retained, the school will need to provide ex- periences at which they can succeed. Being manual in ability should be no less respectable than being academic. We have been inclined to value academic abilities more highly.
The tendency is inevitably to strike a somewhat colorless mean, too fast for the slow, too slow for the fast. The ideal is a system which shall be as fair to the fast as to the slow, to the "hand-minded" as to the "book-minded," but which while meet- ing the separate needs of each, shall yet foster that fellow feeling between human being and human being which is the deepest root of democracy.
Jointly these opposite needs evidently point to one solution: a scheme of relationship between subjects which shall be similar for all students. Within it there must be a place for both spe- cial and general education.
The schools of Ipswich are attempting to meet that chal- lenge by providing in the High School and upper grades rather extensive courses (in consideration of the size of the school) in the industrial arts and the graphic arts, the household arts, music, drawing, and commercial work. By providing accelerated divisions in the academic subjects in the five years of the High School and by the differences in curriculum offerings, provision
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is made for pupils of widely different scholastic aptitude and achievement. The common meeting grounds of all pupils are the home rooms made up of pupils of different classroom divi- sions, the physical education classes and athletic fields, and the Student Council which epitomizes the whole field of extra- curricular activities.
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