event calendar

Sideglances in The Mirror

By SARAH GREENE

TEXAS HAS had problems with public school finance since who laid the chunk.

I was reminded of that the other day when a spate of spring cleaning turned up several books I had forgotten I had. One is a 3-inch, hardbound copy of The Texas Statewide School Adequacy Survey carried out for the then-new State Board of Education as a Works Progress Administration project in the mid-1930s.

This heavy tome was once a volume in the East Mountain High School library. Introductory pages explain that the project paid special attention to the “efficiency of the existing organization of administrative units, adequacy of public school plants, and the problem of sources and adequacy of amounts of school support with possibility of more equitable distribution of state school monies.”

In short, as a quick look at the statistical tables on each of Texas’ 254 counties shows, there were way too many poorly-financed common school districts with tiny schools taught by from one to seven or eight teachers for as few as five months in the school year.

THE BOOK begins with a 40-page analysis of Brown County schools, with two independent districts, Brownwood and Bangs, and 19 common school districts. The county was fully described and the schools were looked at statistically from every possible financial and educational perspective.

The county had only one colored school and the report said, “Due to racial prejudices, this will, in all probability be the situation for some time. It is reported that negroes are not permitted to live in the rural areas of the county.”

A proposal presented for Brown County called for nine ways to provide “adequate educational opportunities” and a 12-point reorganization plan to discontinue schools in 11 communities and to make the county, with certain small areas detached, one unit for purposes of taxation and school administration.

BROWN COUNTY’S treatment seems to have been an example of what the WPA researchers could have done with more money and time, for the other counties got lesser results.

Upshur County, which had 36 white common school districts in the 1934-35 school year and three independent districts (Gilmer, Big Sandy and Ore City) is relegated to the back of the book, along with 32 other counties for which “no maps were available.”

The first 103 counties had ten or more pages of statistical tables and maps showing the then-current arrangement of districts and the proposed reorganization.

ONE OF THESE, Camp County, was described as a county with two/thirds of its 61,892 acres in cultivation for a variety of crops, with county seat Pittsburg as one of the chief shipping points for Texas sweet potatoes. Operating then with one ISD (Pittsburg) and 15 common districts, under reorganization it would have had one county-wide “administrative unit” and two attendance zones.

Nearly eight pages of detailed statistical tables examined costs of reorganization, the distribution of assessed values, comparison of teachers’ education and experience with state averages and other data.

THE NEXT 118 districts had 4-page entries, two pages for the before and after maps and two pages of tables on the common and independent districts with breakdowns of enrollment, average daily attendance, teacher loads and days taught, tax rates, bonded debt and per pupil costs.

Gregg, Smith, Morris and Marion are in this group.

Data from Upshur, Harrison and the other mapless counties reflected a situation 70 years ago that seems amazing now. This was just before the wave of consolidations that left the county with only a few common school districts when the post-World War II era began.

The only three independent districts in 1935, at Gilmer, Big Sandy and Ore City, enrolled a total of 1,311 students and the colored students in those districts totaled 683.

THE COMMON districts enrolled 3,955 white students and 1,652 colored.

Upshur’s 36 white common districts included names still familiar today — Kelsey, Pritchett, Glenwood, Rosewood, Rhonesboro, Indian Rock, Enon, Shady Grove, Soules Chapel and others. Some are all but forgotten, such as Bethel, which had one teacher and 24 students enrolled, and Boxwood, a 2-teacher school with 29 enrolled.

The months for which teachers were paid ranged from 4 1/2 months at Pleasant Grove, a 2-teacher school, to eight months at Union Ridge, Concord, Union Hill, Soules Chapel, Lone Mountain and a few others.

The great East Texas Oil Boom was in full swing by 1934, of course, and this shows up in the relative evaluations of the common districts. Indian Rock, with 194 students enrolled in a 10-grade school, had $1.4 million in assessed valuation; Glenwood, with 136 students, had $1.3 million. By comparison, Union Ridge had 11 grades with 226 students, and a valuation of only $194,000.

BUT THE BIG winners were soon-to-be-independent East Mountain, with a tax base of $5.53 million and 326 students, and Union Grove, with $5.2 million in valuation and 174 students.

There were 27 colored common school districts, the smallest operating 1-teacher schools with fewer than 30 students. These were Perryville, Boxwood, Shady Grove and Cross Roads. East Mountain’s colored district had $22,305 in tax valuation, Union Grove had $25,246, Glenwood had $9,206, and Indian Rock, $3,476. The remaining districts had less than $1,000 in tax valuation.

THE WPA provided needed employment for researchers, writers and artists but, more significantly, for the 20 percent of Texan workers who were unemployed in 1935 at the depths of the Depression.

I happened on to a chart in a 1993 edition of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly that placed Upshur County near the bottom when it came to per capita WPA spending. The chart was attached to a story about how important the WPA spending was to Fredericksburg and Gillespie County, a predominantly German area that had been mostly isolated from the rest of Texas by bad roads and a self-sufficient economy and culture.

The table showed the total Federal Work Relief spending in each county from 1933 to June, 1939. At No. 83, Gillespie County had received $80.49 per capita in a range that went from No. 1 Burnet County, at $2,160 per person, to No. 254 Andrews County, which received only $4.53 in benefits for each of its 1,277 residents.

UPSHUR came in at No. 232, with $891,083 in WPA relief spending.. This worked out to $34.03 for each of 26,178 residents. This put us just five slots below Wood County, which got $36.21 for each of its 24,360 citizens. Part of the explanation for that may be that. as noted in the Gillespie County story, the 1930 oil boom protected parts of the state from the economic ravages of the Depression.

Few of the Northeast Texas counties ranked in the top half of federal relief spending; highest was Franklin County, with $78.24 per capita ranking it No. 79. Harrison County, close behind at $77.18, was No. 93.

For reasons I won’t attempt to analyze here, the two counties that benefitted most from the East Texas boom, Gregg and Smith, did much better than Upshur: Gregg, with 58,027 residents at $57.08 each coming in at No. 149, and Smith, $52.27 for each of 69,090 residents ranking No. 168.

sgreene@tatertv.com