“The main floor contains a school room 22 × 27 feet in the clear, lighted wholly from the north side. A ground glass in the rear admits sunlight for sanitation. Schoolroom has adjustable seats and desks, telephone, and teachers’ desk. Stereopticon is hung in wall at rear. Alcove or closet on east side for books, teachers’ wraps, etc. Schoolroom has a small organ, ample book cases, shelves, and apparatus. Pure air enters from above children’s heads and passes out at floor into ventilating stack through fireplace.
“Main floor has two toilet rooms, each of these having lavatories, wash bowl with hot and cold water, pressure tank for hot water and for heat, shower bath with hot and cold water, ventilating apparatus, looking glass, towel rack, soap box, etc. Each toilet room is reached by a circuitous passageway furnishing room for children’s wraps, overshoes, etc. The scheme secures absolute privacy in toilet rooms. All toilet room walls contain air chambers to deaden sound. The toilet rooms are clean, decent, and beautiful. They are never disfigured with vile language or other defacement.
“All rural schoolhouses with the comb of the roof running one way have attics, but the attic of this rural school is the first one and the only one that has been well utilized. This attic is 15 × 35 feet, inside measurement, all in one room; distance from floor to ceiling 7½ feet in the middle part. It is abundantly lighted through gable lights and roof lights. It contains modern manual-training benches for use of eight or ten children at one time, a gas range and other apparatus for experimental cooking. It is furnished with both gas and electric light. It has a wash bowl with hot and cold water, looking glass, towels, etc. It has a large typical kitchen sink and a drinking fountain, but no drinking cup, either common or uncommon. It has cupboards, boxes, and receptacles for various experiments in home economics. It has a disinfecting apparatus, a portable agricultural-chemistry laboratory and numerous other equipments.
Plate XIII.
Fig. 15.—A rear view of the model rural school building at the Kirkville Normal.
“A rural school can be built here from beginning to completion with all the above-mentioned equipments of every kind, including furniture, for $2250. The heating and ventilating apparatus, the pressure tanks, gasoline engine, water pumps, dynamo, furnace, etc., can all be easily adapted to a two-room model, a three-room school, or a six-room school by having each fixture slightly larger.
“This model therefore solves the schoolbuilding question for villages, towns, and consolidated rural schools.”