Consolidation, among its many advantages, reduces the number of classes per day, and increases the time which the teacher may devote to each class. Note the contrast between that schedule of a one-room teacher and the teaching schedule of a consolidated school teacher in the same county:
Teacher’s Daily Program
FORENOON
| Time | Class | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30 | Opening Exercises | All |
| 8:45 | Desk | 1-B |
| 8:50 | Phonetics | 1-A |
| 9:00 | Phonetics | 1-B |
| 9:15 | Reading | 1-A |
| 9:30 | Reading | Second |
| 9:45 | Rest Exercise | All |
| 10:00 | Nature | All |
| 10:15 | Rest | All |
| 10:30 | Words | 1-B |
| 10:50 | Words | 1-A |
| 11:10 | Numbers | Second |
| 11:30 | History | 1-A |
The “district,” or one-room, schools in Montgomery County, Indiana, have twenty-three pupils per teacher, scattered over six grades. The consolidated schools in the same county show sixteen pupils per teacher, in three grades. While the teacher in the district school averages twenty-seven recitations a day, the teacher in the consolidated school has eleven; but the time per recitation is: district, thirteen minutes; consolidated, twenty-nine minutes. The number of minutes which the district teacher may give to each grade is fifty minutes; the consolidated teacher has one hundred and seventeen minutes per grade. Badly sprinkled with figures as that statement is, it gives some idea of the increased opportunities for effective teaching in the consolidated school. No teacher can do justice to twenty-seven classes per day, and an average recitation period of thirteen minutes is so short as to be almost unworthy of mention.
Most consolidated schools, in addition to the ordinary rooms, have an assembly room in which lectures, festivals, socials, public meetings, and farmers’ institutes are held. Acting as a center for community life, the consolidated school takes a real place in the instruction of the community. The big brick or stone building, well constructed and surrounded, as it usually is, by well-kept grounds, furnishes the same kind of local monument that the court house supplies in the county seat. People point proudly to it as “their” public building. It is an experience of note in traveling across an open farming country to come suddenly upon a splendidly-equipped, two-story school, set down, at a point of vantage, several miles away from the nearest railroad.
The consolidated school at Linden, Montgomery County, Indiana, for example, situated in a town of scarcely three hundred inhabitants, is equipped with gas from its own gas-plant; with steam heat; ample toilet accommodations; an assembly room; and halls so broad that the primary children may play some of their games there in bad weather.
One of the most widely discussed among consolidated schools is the John Swaney Consolidated School, of Putnam County, Illinois.[22] The John Swaney School occupies a twenty-four acre campus, lying a mile and a half from the nearest village, and ten miles from the nearest town. The agitation for consolidation in Putnam County led John Swaney and his wife to give twenty-four acres as a campus for a local consolidated school. Hence the name and much of the success which has attended the work of the school.
The school cost $15,000, equipped. It is of brick with four class-rooms, two laboratories, a library, offices, a manual training shop, a domestic science kitchen, and a basement play-room. The building is lighted, heated, and ventilated in the most modern fashion. The John Swaney School thus came into existence with an equipment adequate for any school and elaborate for a school situated far from the channels of trade and industry.
The course of study organized includes all of the modern specialized work which the effective city school is able to do. Securing good teachers and possessing unique facilities, the school carries boys and girls through a series of years, in which intellectual, experimental, manual, recreational, and social activities combine to make the school the center of community life and community influence.