These interruptions mean a serious waste from the girl’s meager allowance of time for schooling. She passes at each shift to a new set of teachers who know nothing of her record and tendencies. Frequently she is put back a grade. She resents this, grows discouraged, and perhaps loses interest. Besides, so much ease in changing weakens the school’s authority. It is, however, a safeguard against the rigidity of a single autocratic system. It gives some room for experiment with a difficult child, until the régime and the teacher with whom she will fit may be found. A restriction of the transfer would certainly be a blow to the truant officer’s method of dealing with girls. At present it constitutes his one suggestion, his only “golden cure.”
The girl’s schooling begins to suffer as soon as there is any especial need for assistance at home.[78] Two or three days are dropped repeatedly. Wage-earning sisters cannot stop at home to nurse an invalid or care for younger children while the mother works. When a new baby comes, it is the oldest school girl who carries the extra burden of work. Even the most devoted mothers make these encroachments on the time which belongs to the school. They are driven to it by necessity. “What can I do? There ain’t nobody else and I’ve got to keep Mamie t’ help.”
When Mrs. Kersey went to the hospital, it was “Baby,” the eleven-year-old daughter, who was kept out of school to do the work, and not her older sister employed in a factory. “You ought t’ ’a’ seen how Baby run our house,”—her wage-earning sister was giving the account. “Gee, but she was that strict, believe me. I couldn’t have a cent o’ my money. No shows them days fer mine. She cried if me father didn’t give ’er his pay an’ she made him, too. She’d give him his quarter fer shavin’ money, but not a cent more. An’ she bought everythin’ an’ run things herself. Me mother was away sick fer nine months. Baby, she’s an awful good girl.”
Emma Larkey, having at last struggled up to Class 5B, had just dropped out of school for good. She was normal in body and mind. She should have been in the graduating class. Why wasn’t she? In the first place, she had changed schools eight times since her start, wandering indifferently from public to parochial school and then back again. In the second place, there were five younger children and she was constantly being kept at home. The mother patched grain sacks in order to pay rent for a well lighted apartment of five rooms. “There are nine of us, and if I don’t work, we’d have to crowd up an’ sleep in those black stuffy bedrooms. I can’t bear for the children to do that.” Decent living quarters and fresh air for the whole family seemed more important than Emma’s schooling. Something must give way under such pressure and so it was Emma who went down. She had braced her young shoulders to tasks more difficult than school lessons and had lost all desire to finish the grammar grades by the time the second girl was old enough to relieve her at home.
The result of so much absence was seen in the great retardation among our girls. Thirteen to fifteen is regarded as the normal age for graduation,[79] and by this standard only 10 of our 65 girls were in the normal grade. All the rest were “laggards.” There were, for instance, 35 girls who were fourteen years old, the normal age for graduation. Some of them had gone to work, while others were still in school. The grades they had left or were still attending are shown in the following distribution: Two had reached the 3B grade; four, 4A; three, 4B; one, 5A; four, 5B; four, 6A; four, 6B; five, 7A; three, 7B; and four, 8A. One girl had been in an institution. The girls are thus seen to have been distributed almost impartially from the third to the eighth grade. There was for them practically no relation between age and grade.
An occasional girl is defiantly truant. Her refusal to fit into the school system marks a deeper vein of rebellion than in the case of the boy, who more commonly slips the leading strings. Or else it marks an undeveloped body and spirit in dealing with which the usual forcible methods of combating truancy are often ineffectual.
Annie Gibson was a slim, undersized girl of fifteen. Her light, almost colorless hair hung down around small, undeveloped features, strikingly vacant and weak. Her teeth, very small and deeply set, might have been the milk teeth of a well-developed baby. Surrounded by a cover of reticence and a surface of embarrassment, her real thoughts were impossible to discover. She would agree to anything but would seldom volunteer an opinion of her own.
In school she was a passive pupil, never “giving trouble” but learning little, and her attendance record was very low. In time she furnished-one of the most stubborn cases of truancy in the school and the truant officer was sent after her. He found her at home alone, the girl’s mother being away at her regular work as chambermaid in a hotel. As the officer laid his hand on her arm to take her back to school, the child’s passivity suddenly broke and she flung herself on the floor, screaming. The man retreated in consternation, fearful that he might be accused of having physically mishandled the child, while Annie was left to recover from her hysterical outbreak as well as she could. This is only one instance of the futility of applying our present method of dealing with truancy to these exceptional cases. This child was primarily in need of careful mental and physical examination and probably of special training which could only be defined after such an examination had been made.
When the difficulty rests with the girl there is no course between threats and a sentence of great severity. The parent may be fined, but then the punishment does not fall on the child. If she is sent away it must be to a reformatory, not to a school. Let us see how these methods would work applied to Christina Cull, another of our girls who was a stubborn truant. At fourteen, she had reached Class 4A. She had not “made her days”; that is, attended school for 130 days during the year prior to her fourteenth birthday. Nor had she gone far enough in her classes to get her working papers. But Christina refused to pass the doorway of a school. She had gone far beyond the influence of the ordinary school.
Five years before, one of the Catholic fathers had found her loitering in the rear of his church. It was soon after Christmas and he stopped to ask about her holiday. She answered shortly that she had had neither presents nor a good time. His interest in the pathetic, sullen child took him later to her home. The family was squalidly poor. They lived in three dark basement rooms, without comfort or decency. The father, after four years of desertion, had returned home in the final stage of tuberculosis to be cared for until his death.