Consolidation Fail

A Peace Process in Action
​If you've ever agreed to foster a cat from a rescue group that promised, "just until we can find a permanent home," and after a bit you decide to KEEP that cat forever...it's called a FOSTER FAIL! First, you debate with yourself convinced you don't need a fourth cat: more food, extra kitty litter, more vacuuming, vet bills, will my three knuckleheads get along with the new member? You set up the safe room. The others hover at the door for days, their routines change, they exhibit personality glitches. The initial meeting is rocky, some posturing from both sides, maybe hissing, then days of toleration ...eventually peace.  And soon enough they're  sleeping in the same space, if apart.  You make the call of permanency. That failure becomes one of your successes when the cats settle happily enough in their crowder.*  
* a group of cats (just learned this!)

​I couldn't help but see a similar pattern when I was reading a 19th century essay by a county supervisor of rural schools in Pennsylvania. Actually, it 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  his/her first-hand accounts entitled, My Babes in the Woods, p. 857, writer unnamed unfortunately.

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 reopened, 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.
* (my connections)

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