Education: Over & Over & Over

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For four weeks, the slim, blue-eyed young woman had buzzed over the back roads of Georgia, stopping off at one school after another. At each stop she interviewed teachers and pupils, while a photographer took pictures of their classrooms. By the time she had finished her tour, 33-year-old Reporter Margaret Shannon of the Atlanta Journal had enough material for 15 articles—and a shocking portrait of just how bad U.S. rural schools can be.

Reporter Shannon's articles, running in the Journal this week, began with Zebulon High School in Pike County, an unkempt building with creaking steps and crumbling plaster, and a rusty bell without a clapper. Close by stood its "lunchroom " a former Army barracks that sagged and leaned dangerously. Through 28 Georgia counties Reporter Shannon came upon a similar pattern of dirt and decay—"a theme," she wrote, "that plays almost like a broken record . . . over & over & over . . . in unfortunate Georgia schools."

Isn't If Awful?" The Apalachee School in Morgan County had only two teachers for all seven grades. Its floors were so rough, said the principal, that "the boys & girls are always getting splinters in their feet. It had no lavatory and no running water, only a hydrant in the yard and two primitive outdoor privies. "Isn't it awful?" demanded the principal. "I won't go down there." The rickety Ola schoolhouse in Henry County was not much better. Plumped in the middle of "an almost treeless field of pale dust," it had only four rooms and four teachers for seven grades and 121 pupils.

In one school, the rotting windowsills had to be propped up with sticks. In the Broad River School, "on the side of a winding road that climbs a mountain and becomes impassable in bad weather," the boys had to bring water "from a leaf-lined hole." For restrooms, the girls used "a crude privy; boys, the woods . . . The [school] building is about 40 years old. It leans slightly to the left."

"Dime-Store Stuff." Most of the schools Reporter Shannon described had only potbellied or chunk stoves for heating. Most classrooms had only a single naked bulb for lighting, some had no electricity at all. There were gaping holes in both floors and ceilings, broken windowpanes, tattered shades, and only a few pieces ("dime-store stuff") of laboratory equipment.

The principal of a school in Columbia County complained: "We can't seem to get rid of the rats." In an Irwin County school's auditorium, desks had been turned over to make a bin to store the school's lunchroom potatoes ("The only place we have," said the principal).

Reporter Shannon was drawing no conclusions from the schools she had seen, thought the plain facts alarming enough in themselves. Judging by the mail coming into the Journal from aroused parents, most readers seemed to think so, too.