Education: Walkout in Texas

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A little boy had injured his arm by sticking it up the chute of the school's soft drink machine in search of a reluctant bottle. The school authorities ordered the machine removed. That seemed to the students about as sensible as taking away a diving board because somebody had dived into the pool when it was empty. And to deprive kids of Cokes in Orange County, Tex. was like taking milk away from babies.

At the next school-board meeting, students from Bancroft school stormed into the hall and demanded their machine back. They also had a few other grievances: they couldn't go home for lunch, they couldn't play on the school grounds after hours. When they got to shouting and stamping their feet, they were sent home.

Next day 70 kids went on strike, parading in front of the school with large posters demanding that the school board resign. Parents begged them to stop. Wispy Miss Inez Wallace, the school principal, stood in the doorway frantically ringing her school bell. The kids ignored both parents and principal. They wrote a letter to the State Board of Education: "We are Americans, and we have some rights."

It was the parents who gave in. "We have talked," said one, "until we are blue in the face." Finally almost all the parents signed a petition asking the school-board members to quit.

Said the irate Amarillo News in an editorial: "Here seems to be the real cause of juvenile delinquency ... So the parents can't budge the children, eh? And as a solution they [try to] fire the duly elected authorities who made the rules .. . We came up in a generation when a certain part of the rebellious child's anatomy would have been blue." At week's end, over half of the 130 students were still out on strike.

In Detroit, School Superintendent Arthur Dondineau approved schoolroom spanking when a pupil is in need of one.