Nice Try!

First Hand Account: A "Consolidation Fail"

​Articles in professional journals of the past tell some very interesting stories about rural school life.  I came across a 19th century essay by a county supervisor of rural schools in Pennsylvania in a random Google search.  Actually, this entry was light reading despite its provenance, "The Contributors Club" section of The Atlantic Monthly, June 1899, Vol.83, Issue 500. That's a mouthful, but it serves as one of  the writer's first-hand accounts under the title, My Babes in the Woods, p. 857. Unfortunately, whoever penned the essay  went unnamed, which seemed very strange, but it was one of four different stories included under the same title.

1. The Bright Idea*
During my experience of seventeen years as  supervisor of rural schools in one of the most favored counties in the South, it has been my habit, several times a year to travel twenty or thirty miles a day, often for five days a week, visiting schools....Sometime ago we proposed to consolidate the schools in one of our rural districts. We ordered seven small schools to be closed, hired three wagons to move along the highways and take the children to school, enlarged one of the buildings to accommodate a hundred children and had a fine program laid out.
 
2. Growing Pains for a Community*
It should have been successful but it came to grief because every man wanted to do the "hauling." After the contract was given out, one man said he was not going to trust his children behind, "them old runaway mules;" another complained of the driver, who was accused of taking a nip on a cold day; and a third objected to the wagon. The result was that everybody refused to be hauled and the wagons went back and forth almost empty for a month. The men who had the contract for a dollar a day to drive the wagons hauled nobody but their own children. They were content, but they were alone.

3. Compromise and Peace*
A petition with many signatures came up before the Board of Education and the committee which was appointed to go over the whole matter declared that consolidation was good thing, but that it did not work for this community. So the wagons were dismissed, the little schools were re-opened, and the district is now drifting along sleepily, with its seven separate groups of twenty to twenty-five children, scattered about five miles apart. The schools prevailed and the parents were content. The plan may have been badly managed, but I feel sure it was in advance of its times. Our people just needed time to grow up to it.

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