In connection with practically every consolidated school is some form of community or farmer's club.... Especially during the past year much was done through these agencies for the promotion of rural life, social and educational. The consolidated school principal, with his faculty, is experiencing a new and enlarged obligation and opportunity.
Bowman County:
Considerable work for consolidation has been done from this office. Sixteen public meetings have been held, and the proposition of consolidation thoroughly discussed with more than twelve hundred of our people. Through this system of education the movement is finding favor with our people, and it will be only a short time before more than half of this county is consolidated.
McHenry County:
We have three purely country consolidated schools, each serving a township, and from our experience here we have come to the conclusion that districts of this kind are not a success with bus transportation unless they have an assessed valuation of $175,000 or more. Part of the burden of transportation must be borne by parents of the children attending school. With the family transportation system these schools are working out very well, being able to employ three teachers and run nine months of school per year without exceeding the maximum tax levy.
Eighteen consolidated and graded schools were in operation in the county last year, and 40.2 per cent of all the children in the county are now enjoying graded school facilities.... McHenry is a purely agricultural county.
Everywhere the consolidated school has been successful and has shown far greater efficiency than the scattered one-teacher schools. This gives promise that the consolidated rural school will in a few years prevail.
THE RURAL SCHOOL-TEACHER
In a number of states visited by the writer the prevailing type of rural school-teacher was a girl of from eighteen to twenty years of age. That the country school-teacher is an astonishingly young person is attested by all reports on the subject. An educational survey of South Dakota [35] showed that the largest group of rural teachers range between nineteen and twenty-five years of age; twenty-nine teachers were under seventeen years of age, and fifty-three were just seventeen.
Most of the teachers about whom the writer collected information were serving their first or second year. Only a few had been teaching for three or more years. According to the above survey of South Dakota, 31 per cent of the rural teachers were teaching their first school, and only 9.6 per cent had taught as many as four schools. Few teachers, the report showed, have taught more than one or two years in a school, while the average teaching life of a rural teacher is three and three quarters school years. The instability of the profession is so great that it is necessary for the state of South Dakota to recruit annually about one third of its total teaching force of 7,000.