MEETINGS
Meeting April 14 at Kings Restaurant in Sarver – the Community Room – at 7 p.m. May 12 we will resume meeting at the Mill.
NEXT NEWSLETTER
The deadline for articles for the next Newsletter is May 20. We appreciate articles recently shared with us and would like to have more. We are always open to content suggestions. Contact Carol or the Society.
WEB SITE
Go to www.fahs-pa.org and check it out. Another location is www.mickeysmill.org. Both sites change from time to time, so visit frequently.
EDUCATION IN FREEPORT THEN AND NOW
A copy of the Directory and Handbook of Information for Freeport Public Schools, 1927 – 1928 has been acquired by the Historical Society. School began that year on September 6 and ended June 1 – about 2 weeks shorter than the current school year. Supervising Principal was E. O. Liggitt; he had office hours from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday and 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. He had no office hours on Thursdays. Our Administrators today work 8 hours a day (usually more) year around. The school board consisted of 5 members. Mrs. Daisy Chapman was attendance officer and assistant janitor. She was also the mother of our own Rod Chapman. Twenty-two teachers were listed in the handbook. Today there are about 150 professional staff members (teachers and administrators), and 80 plus support personnel (aides, cafeteria workers, custodians, and secretaries).
It was interesting to read that teachers met once per week for an hour. Today teachers meet about an hour/month and also attend several in- service and parent/teacher conferences days.
Courses offered included shop for boys and cooking and sewing for girls – no chance for guys to learn to cook in those days! Penmanship was still being taught in 8th grade unlike today when children begin in the early grades to learn the keyboard.
Languages – Latin was available, a student could actually take Latin I, II, III and IV. Today Latin is not taught at Freeport. French I and II could be taken; today French I through IV is available to Freeport students as well as Spanish I, II, III, and IV.
The courses of study were divided into three groups – academic (college prep), general and commercial.
For those taking the commercial course, typewriting had to be taken in connection with shorthand.
The high school day consisted of six 55 to 60 minute classes per day. Today our students have eight 41 min. classes per day. Teachers today have one planning period per day. It was suggested that junior high students do at-home study of one to two hours a day, senior high students one to three hours per day. Young people apparently did not have all the extra curricular activities then that they do now.
Some clubs included Student Council, Glee Club, Orchestra, Home Economics, Science and National Honor Society.
First and second grade students had class from 8:50 to 11:30 and again from 12:55 to 3:15.
Their older siblings in third grade had to stay ten minutes longer in the morning, leaving the building for lunch at 11:40. The older students began at 8:50, left for lunch at 11:45. They also returned from lunch at 12:55 but remained until 3:45. Our schools today operate on this time schedule: Elementary classes begin at 8:50, there is a 30 minute lunch period in the cafeteria, and dismissal is at 3:30. Secondary students begin their day at 7:45 and go till 2:37. There was no Kindergarten listed in the handbook; today there are three choices of education for Kindergarten – half day, full day, and extended day.
Grades earned now are the typical A, B, C, D, and E. In those days it was E for excellent (95–100 %) with only 5% of students getting the top grade. G stood for good (87 to 94%), Satisfactory – S – (76-86%) with 50% of students receiving this grade. C stood for credit (70 to 75%) and U for unsatisfactory for below 70% and failing.
In the 1927-1928 school year, there were 7 tuition students from South Buffalo Twp., 7 from Buffalo Twp., 2 from Harrison Twp. And 12 individuals for a total of 28 elementary tuition students from outside Freeport Borough.
In secondary there were 82 tuition students from South Buffalo Twp., 26 from Buffalo Twp., 6 from Allegheny Twp., 4 from North Buffalo Twp., and 4 individuals for a total of 121.
Tuition rates were as follows:
Grades 1 – 3 paid $4.00 per month per pupil
Grades 4 – 6 paid $4.50 per month per pupil
Grades 7 – 8 had to cough up $7 per month
Grades 9 – 12 had a whopping $10 per month per pupil. Individuals were required to pay their tuition on or before the 15th of each calendar month. The townships were billed three times per year.
Tuition at this time – would you believe $6,800 per year for elementary students; secondary students pay $7,500 a year! At the present time Freeport has one elementary tuition student.
In the year preceding the handbook Freeport schools received $11,044 from the State and $9,486.07 was received in tuition fees. Apparently the federal government kicked in no monies; but there were also no federal mandates – there was nothing like the No Child Left Behind Act.
Some other items of interest in the handbook: Substitute teachers were hired when a teacher was absent. But, big BUT, the salary paid the substitute teacher was deducted from the monthly salary paid the regular teacher!
The auditorium could be rented for $25. Today the Junior High auditorium rents for $50 if you are a resident, it is for a non-profit organization, and you are not charging admission. The school has a rather extensive fee schedule; the auditorium could rent for as high as $250 per hour for a non-resident, profit organization.
There was an assembly period every week for intermediate and high school students with interesting programs and outside speakers.
The final page of the handbook looked ahead to the future with various items to be considered:
Development of the school library and better facilities for teaching art.
Increased salary schedule for teachers (the salary then was not listed; today beginning teachers start around $28,000 to $29,000 depending on education and experience).
Purchase of a moving picture machine for the auditorium.
“An adjustment room to be set apart for subnormal or abnormal children.”
This last item is in quotes because the Grist editor wanted you to know exactly how it was written. The language is truly dreadful, is it not? Our terminology has changed so much over the years. Children today may have learning disabilities or even retardation, but we have come a long way from calling them subnormal or abnormal. Freeport now employs nine Special Education teachers. Freeport also sends students to a variety of outside placements when needed.
FEAR AND LOATHING IN FREEPORT: MISADVENTURES WITH A MIMEOGRAPH
by Gay Revi
First day on the new job! It was September of 1962 and I pulled open the heavy, double front door of the yellow brick school building on Fourth Street in Freeport as a TEACHER and not as a student. It was exciting beyond words for a brand-new graduate of Edinboro State Teacher’s College to have an official, signed contract with a yearly salary of just about $4,000.
I had first entered this building in 1947 as a second grader from a one-room school in Butler Junction that housed grades 1-12. Now, all 12 grades would be spread throughout this gorgeous building. Homerooms for grades 1-6 were on the first floor. Junior and Senior High students were on the second floor. AND, students in the Freeport school didn’t have to use an outhouse, as we did in BJ!
When I graduated from FHS in 1958, the building was extremely overcrowded. Elementary students who lived in Freeport had already moved into their own building in 1955 in what is now the Kindergarten Center. But by the summer of 1957, the overcrowding was so severe in the high school building that the District decided to go to a “half-day” schedule. Senior High students would attend in the morning until 12:30 P.M. Junior High students would attend in the afternoon. The theory was that Senior High students would be better able to find jobs if their afternoons were free. The split-day schedule lasted until the fall of 1961 when the new Senior High School was completed.
In the winter of my senior year, I had my first experience as a teacher in Freeport. A flu epidemic had struck the area, and many students as well as teachers and substitutes were absent. In an effort to keep schools open, the District decided to place high school seniors in elementary school classrooms as substitute teachers. Harold J. Bush, the high school principal, called several of us to his office and asked if we would be willing to teach in the elementary school in Freeport. I believe that all of us were girls, and that all of us accepted. For the next several days, in addition to doing my homework and keeping up with my regular classroom assignments, I also had to read lesson plans. I was hooked!
Now, as a teacher, I walked up that ultra-narrow, one-way staircase to my homeroom on the second floor – Room 208. It was at the top of the staircase. I loved this room. I had learned the mysteries and delights of diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs in this room from my favorite teacher, Grace Johnston. It was an honor to follow in her footsteps.
Getting materials ready for my students was a huge task. Remember, this was 1962, long before copying machines and electric typewriters. Assignments and tests had to be prepared by typing a stencil and then running the stencil through a mimeograph machine. I was a terrible typist, so I probably used the equivalent of my salary on stencils and correction fluid. I was constantly “starting over” with a new stencil because I had made too many mistakes as I banged away on the clunky, old manual typewriter. Wikipedia, a free on-line encyclopedia, describes the stencil process:
As the 2-page stencil was typed, the impact of the typewriter key displaced the wax, making the tissue paper permeable to the oil-based ink. The stencil was wrapped around the drum of the (manual or electrical) machine, which was filled with ink. When a blank sheet of paper was drawn between the rotating drum and a pressure roller, ink was forced out through the marks on the stencil. The paper had a surface texture like bond paper, and the ink was usually black, although green and red inks were available. Mistakes could be corrected by applying “correction fluid” (wax dissolved in a solvent) with a small brush, then retyping over it. If one put the stencil on the drum wrong side out, the copies came out mirror-imaged. The process was messy, and ink would often get on one’s hands. In addition, the striking surface of the letters on the typewriter would quickly become clogged with wax; the closed letter forms, such as “o” or “b” made a stencil cut that resulted in black blobs instead of white spaces in the center.
I was truly the Blob Queen of Freeport Junior High School!
The usual excitement of the first days of the school year was squelched that September of 1962 because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We teachers gathered quietly in the lounge and in the hallways and whispered our fears of war to each other. October was incredibly tense. It brought back memories of earlier “Cold War” days when, as elementary students, my class had practiced “Duck and Cover” drills on the first floor of this building. (You can view the Duck and Cover movie that millions of school children in the ‘50s watched at http://www.eddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/civildef/duckncver.htm)
Eventually the international crisis subsided. I dedicated myself to introducing my students to squiggly marks such as commas and apostrophes, to parallel construction and indirect objects. I hope I taught them to avoid the unforgivable sin of using a double negative. We read short stories and poetry and took a field trip to Pittsburgh to see the movie Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brandon. I loved my students and my job. But I was restless. In the spring of l963, I applied for a position teaching English in the Peace Corps. I was accepted and left Freeport at the end of the school year in May of 1963 to begin training for my assignment in Sierra Leone, West Africa. I took a huge cut in pay; the Peace Corps paid only $75 a month. But, in my new school in Magburaka, Sierra Leone, I never had to worry about confronting the dreaded mimeograph machine. There wasn’t one. There weren’t very many books, either, and chalk was rarely available. I was homesick for my classroom back in Freeport. And, YES, I confess, I even missed my nemesis, the mimeograph machine.
Editor’s Note: Gay Revi and her husband, Ben Stahl, retired to Springfield, Missouri, from Indonesia, where they lived for many years. Besides Freeport and Sierra Leone, Gay has taught English in Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Bakersfield, California, as well as in Bontang and Jakarta, Indonesia. She is the webfrau for the FHS Class of 1958 at www.bagpro.net/freeport58. We very much appreciate her writing and sharing these wonderful memories of education in Freeport in the middle of the 20th century.
MY MOTHER, THE TRUANT OFFICER
By Rod Chapman
My mother, Daisy Chapman, was part of the custodial department of the Freeport Public School on Fourth Street – now the Freeport Junior High. In addition she was the truant officer for the elementary grades. What was it like to have your mother be the truant officer?
It didn’t make much difference to me because I didn’t know what the job was until my 5th and 6th grade class when some kids played “hooky.”
If kids missed many days without an excuse or if the parents weren’t aware their kids were not in school, then my Mom had to visit the parents. If people kept a kid out of school to work at home they would be arrested and have a hearing before the Justice of the Peace. Mom would have to appear to state her findings.
I knew I could never play “hooky” or I would suffer at home!
Editor’s Note: Thank's Rod, for sharing this memory.
EMAILS – WE’RE GETTING LOTS
We are getting many “hits” on the web page and many emails about a variety of subjects are being received. In the next issue of Grist we will share some of them.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST
We must thank Rich Buday and Buday Printing, 5th Street in Freeport, for continuing to
print Grist for us. Not only does he donate his ink and time (and we’re not talking a dreaded mimeograph machine here!), he also patiently searches for photographs to include from time to time. Rich – luv ya, you are A-OK in our book!