predominated politically and socially. For an American city of its size
to-day, Gary represents, not a specialized community, but a fairly
harmonious distribution of social classes, races, occupations, and
interests. It is essentially a normal, variedly functioning, independent
community, and the schools have been developed to meet the needs of a
modern varied urban community.
It must be emphasized that neither the demands of a peculiar type of
industrial community nor the work of benevolent philanthropy created the
schools of Gary. They have been developed in response to the typically
current needs of a normal American municipality. They have had to meet
the same situations which all American cities are confronting in their
effort to educate “all the children of all the people.”
Organized under a school administration consisting of a board of
education with three members working in conjunction with a
superintendent of schools, the school system depends for support
entirely upon local taxation and the usual sources of revenue, and
enjoys no unusual municipal or financial advantages. On the contrary,
the enterprise of providing public schools for the town of Gary was one
of peculiar difficulty. The new and rapidly growing town required the
immediate creation of a school plant, in addition to the annual cost of
instruction and maintenance. The community was poor. A large proportion
of the people, being recently arrived immigrants, owned no taxable
property. The plants of the Steel Corporation, the most valuable
property in the community, were habitually undervalued in the
assessments. The state laws, moreover, provide that school revenues for
any given year are to be obtained on an assessment made almost two years
before. The result in a new city like Gary, where the population had
been doubling each year, was, therefore, that current school revenues
had to be based on assessment values obtained when the population was
only one quarter as great.
In the face of all these formidable difficulties the success of the Gary
school system seems little short of amazing. In the short space of eight
years the population has increased from three hundred to over thirty
thousand. No ordinary city would attempt to supply school facilities to
a population which doubled every year. The mere physical problem of
providing seats for the children would be insurmountable. A city which
followed the conventional school plan would be swamped. At the present
time, with their much slower yearly increase of population, half of the
cities of over one hundred thousand in this country have insufficient
sittings for their children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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