PPS in 1968
My parents are the kind of parents that save everything from their children’s childhoods. I just ran across this old PTA Handbook from the 1968/69 school year. It was interesting to look through it and see how things have changed.
It’s true when we tell our kids that they have so many more days off than we did when we were kids. Here’s Grout’s 1968/69 school calendar:
Opening day of school – September 9th
Professional day (school closed) – October 11th
Veteran’s Day (school closed) – November 11th
Thanksgiving (school closed) – November 28-29th
Christmas holiday (school closed) – December 21st-January 1st
Spring vacation (school closed) – March 15-24th
Memorial Day (school closed) – May 30th
Last day of school – June 9th
Grout Elementary was a K-8 in 1968 and the school had:
- 1 principal
- 1 administrative assistant
- 2 secretaries
- 2 PE teachers
- 3 custodians
- 1 librarian
- 1 school nurse
- 1 speech pathologist
- 1 social worker
- 1 remedial reading teacher
- 24 regular classroom teachers
- 9 subject specific teachers
Grout offered music, foreign language, art, home economics, industrial arts, speech, drama and typing along with math, science, reading, and PE.
For the past 20 years, I’ve heard the annual claim that the superintendent has protected the classrooms from cuts and reduced central office staff. That’s bullshit.
Our schools (except the Lincoln, Grant, Wilson and Clevelands) offer nothing while the central office adds deputy superintendents, chiefs, POSAs, TOSAs, project/system managers and communications staff. What could our schools have looked like if the classrooms were truly protected from cuts?
2 comments
Any chance we could see what the central office staffing looked like in comparison to now adjusted for current attendance, laws, school choice and other factors? It would be interesting to see how top heavy CO has become over the years. The IDEA was not yet a law until 1975 and I am not sure about other laws and how they impacted CO staffing. I remember kids getting ESL services in my grade school in the early 80′s. I was so honored in 1st grade to be asked to buddy up with a student from Dominican Republic and help him make friends and learn English. I don’t know if it was required to teach ESL or just something my school did anyway. My teachers took advantage of it though and had the kids teach us their language in a sort of language exchange type of activity. Their parents brought us food from their culture and we learned the history of their country. This was just a regular public school and in a low income neighborhood as well. I am not pining for the good old days but wonder what we can learn from the past to help us now?
Stephanie, I don’t have data from 1968 but I might be able to find some. Meanwhile, if anyone from PPS communications department would like to share the data, I’d be happy to post it. I recognize that there’s a lot to consider when comparing central office staffing in 1968 to now but it’s the disproportionality in how cuts have been made that concerns me. The cuts proposed for 2010/11 are similar to cuts that have been made for the last several decades. Minimal cuts have been made at the central office and large cuts have been made affecting the most vulnerable students.
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