Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

All-year-round schools are projects now in the air which are a natural combination of regular and vacation schools.

School gardens, an important educational addition to school work, have been largely fostered by women. In Seattle the Women’s Congress has coöperated with the Seattle Garden Club in its program to include all the grammar schools of the city in the garden work; the ultimate hope is to persuade the city to take up this work in a systematic way. Harriet Livermore of Yonkers, New York, says of gardening: “It is a happy mingling of play and work, vacation and school, athletics and manual training, pleasure and business, beauty and utility, head and hand, freedom and responsibility; of corrective and preventive, constructive and creative influences, and all in the great school of out-of-doors. It is the corrective of the evils of the schoolroom. It is the preventive of the perils of misspent leisure. It is constructive of character building. It is creative of industrious, honest producers. In fact there is no child’s nature to which it does not in some way make a natural and powerful appeal.”

The Civic Club of Philadelphia seems to have started the first school garden. That city now has over eight large school gardens, nineteen for kindergarten scholars, and 5,000 separate gardens including window boxes, etc. The women of Kalamazoo and Dubuque and Newark are among the groups who inaugurated this work in their towns. The city took over the school garden in Newark after it had been organized and operated for a year by the women. Children’s school gardens in Cincinnati are the result of work started in 1908 by the civic department of the Woman’s Club. In three years’ time thirteen schools were promoting home gardens by distributing seeds among the school children and helping to get results, and there were eight school gardens. Two community gardens crown the educational efforts of the women of Cincinnati.

Mrs. Parsons is president of the International Children’s School Farm League and also director of the Children’s School Farms for the Department of Parks of New York City. The methods used by her in the work in the city parks are original with herself.

The Visiting Teacher

Knowing the vital connection between home life and the proper growth of children in the schools, women interested in educational matters have, within recent years, given great attention to visiting the homes of pupils. The development of the function of the “visiting teacher” is the result of a recognition that the school cannot thrive if it is indifferent to the home surroundings of children.

The visiting teacher is akin to the school nurse, and yet distinct in function. This new office is one of the latest creations in educational experimentation, though not based on novel ideas of education, since the sympathetic teacher has always sought to go beyond her pupils to outside influences that retarded or encouraged development. The visiting teacher comes as an aid to the regular teacher solely for educational purposes. Like the school nurse she makes the child the pivotal point on which she focuses her own experience and training. Like the nurse she may recommend that a child be placed under the care of a psychologist, a physician, a more expert teacher, a kindergartner, or that a social agency be called upon to assist in improving the sanitary, health, or financial features of the home environment. Her point of view, however, is ultimately increased intelligence, whereas the school nurse’s primary aim is health. While the functions of these two public servants are distinct, therefore, there is very often need of perfect coöperation, for health may underlie education in some cases and, in others, poverty may underlie both health and education.

In her report on Visiting Teachers for the Public Education Association of New York, Mary Flexner records the very high ratio of 45 per cent. of the cases covered by visiting nurses for the year 1911–1912 as being “cases” because home poverty retarded the development of the child. In explanation of the term poverty, Miss Flexner says: “This term is interpreted broadly to include all cases in which ‘economic pressure’ makes of the child an illegal wage-earner or a household drudge and forces the family to adopt such a low standard of living that there is neither proper space for the child to study nor proper food to give it the stimulus to do so.” Miss Flexner further shows that 57 per cent. of the cases showed lack of family appreciation of what are the needs of a normal or an abnormal growing child. A summary of the action taken in all the cases is a most vital part of the report.

The work of the visiting teacher began in New York City in 1906 when two settlements managed by women, Hartley House and Greenwich House, placed two visiting teachers in the field. Richmond Hill House and the College Settlement, where women also are the headworkers, were at the same time coöperating with this committee. The Public Education Association became interested at once and added to the number of such teachers. Other agencies soon began to join in the support of these teachers until, in 1913 after three years’ effort, two visiting teachers were placed upon the city’s payroll for ungraded classes.

The Home and School Peace League of Philadelphia has aroused interest in visiting teachers in that city until several are now supported privately for this work and are used to a considerable extent by the Bureau of Compulsory Education to carry out the preventive work in its charge.