Old-fashioned methods of preserving must again prevail. There is educational value in community conservation. Montclair (New Jersey) boys made community evaporators, having a capacity of from five to eight bushels of fruit a day, at a cost of only $10.
A mowing machine is a problem in high-school mechanics, and these farm cadets of New York State see, perhaps for the first time, a use for it.
A day's outing for a purpose. Albany and Troy (New York) orphan-asylum boys on their way to "do their bit" in the currant fields.
A lesson in service geography. Boys from Albany and Troy (New York) picking currants, near Hudson (New York), which were preserved in Yonkers Trades School for shipment to France.
Many community services may be rendered during the war by the principal of a school. He may, as has been done, organize patriotic meetings, enlisting the aid of the churches and arousing the interest of chambers of commerce, civic clubs, and women's clubs in the Red Cross, the Liberty Loan, and school war gardens. His assembly exercises may be made vital through talks to the pupils on opportunities for war service; through platform recognition of boys and girls rendering special farm, garden, Red Cross, and food-conservation help; by placing on a conspicuous bulletin a roll of honor of graduates and students engaged in such work; by keeping the school in touch with graduates who are enlisted in the army and navy by reading their letters to the school and sending school packets to them. He may advise economy in the use of foods and clothing, the elimination of expenditures in soda water, ice cream, and gum, and the sacrifice of pleasure for national ends. He may urge the use of savings in the purchase of government bonds and war-savings certificates. Where the school has been raising money for pictures or a phonograph, he may suggest that the funds raised be used for the purchase of one or more government bonds, to be held by the school as an asset until the close of the war, when the bond may be sold and the money used for its original purpose of buying the phonograph or pictures. In the case of some private secondary schools, and large public schools like the Washington Irving and DeWitt Clinton high schools, New York, the pupils and teachers have subscribed money and given entertainments for the purchase of an ambulance, the gift of the school to the American Expeditionary Force. In one New York City school, through the efforts of a student organization, Liberty Loan bonds to the amount of $479,800 were sold.