S Sanitation in Many School Buildings Deplorable by Nelson E. Viles, School Plant Management, Division of School Administration CHOOL PUPILS may become inured to the lack of adequate school sanitary services but they never become immune to the possible effects of poor school sanitation. Headline publicity is given to the lack of trained school teachers and to the need for school buildings because of overcrowding, but we often fail to show that millions of children are now attending school in buildings lacking the necessary facilities and services to protect their health. We should realize that: Every child forced by law to attend school is entitled to a healthful environment. Children coming from various homes to school are potential carriers for any disease germs that may be present in their homes. These children are often crowded together and have many personal physical contacts in school. They use common sanitary and Many of the school children lack ade- to educate the whole child. He should be Sanitary conditions in the schools have been improved during recent decades, but many new and old buildings are still poorly maintained. The conditions in some buildings indicate an unawareness of the importance of and the principles to be followed in school sanitation. The following are only a few of the illustrations of some of the bad conditions. Is Yours Like This? A three-story and full basement junior high school in a metropolitan area, housing 1,300 children, has one dark dirty odorous basement toilet room at one corner of the building for the 620 to 670 boys housed therein. There are only five or six lavatories with no hot water. There are no hand-washing facilities near the dining room. There are no showers. Toilet room floors are wet; slate urinals are odorous. The walls are rough and positive ventilation is not available for the room. The lunchroom near the center of the building in the basement has a kitchen next to a small dusty playground. There are no ventilating facilities other than through the windows. This is not a slum area building. It is in a nice residential part of the city. A rural consolidated elementary school is located in a good farming region, rural electricity is available, water is supplied by an approved well and is under pressure. The boys' toilet room, accessible only by going outside, has three or four stools. Only one has been in operative condition for some weeks. This stool was a frostproof bowl with no water seal. The stool was badly chipped, water stained, badly encrusted, and odorous. The urinals were a short dirty galvanized iron trough. The place was filthy but had to serve about 140 boys each day. The above are not isolated cases. In one section of a city there are 2,400 pupils without any shower service in the schools, with no hot water in the lavatories, with a part of the pupils housed in a building over 100 years old, and with all rooms crowded, in fact many of them are on double sessions. The citizens of this city are not fully informed of the conditions in their schools. If they were aware of such conditions they might feel it undesirable to permit their children to attend school until improvements are made. School officials have an obligation to inform the local citizens and patrons of the needs of their children. Areas of Poor Sanitation It is not feasible to describe or even list here all of the various areas in school buildings where sanitation becomes a serious problem. In the two areas mentioned here sanitation often is not satisfactory and the effects of poor sanitation in these areas may be felt quickly. Toilet rooms.-A lack of adequate planning and poor installations are partly responsible for the low sanitary standards in toilet, shower, and other sanitary service rooms. In addition maintenance is often inadequate. The following is only a partial listing of some of the conditions often found. Drinking fountain heads are not always properly shielded. The flow is not regulated and pupils' lips may touch openings when drinking. Fountains are not ad justed in height to the pupils using them. Many are not properly cleaned, are unat tractive, have accumulations of dirt, chew ing gum, etc., in them. In many cases lavatories do not have hot water, or temperature is not regulated, and the hot and cold water are delivered through separate spigots. Lavatories are not adjusted to the size of pupils using them and, in some cases, towels and soap are not provided. In many cases toilet stools are dirty and are difficult to maintain. Sometimes they are not properly set. Bad conditions such as the following are too common: Small water seal in stool, rough or chipped stool surfaces, iron and other water deposit streaks on stools, seats broken, dirt in throat or up under rim of the stools. The toilet rooms should be so designed that they may be maintained easily. There Some Needs in School 1. A public awareness of need is essential. School officials should realize the importance of and know the basic principles of school sanitation. 2. Responsibility for school sanita- must be maintained. Maintenance should be positive ventilation separate from other ventilating systems for the building. The floors should be of impervious materials. It is particularly impor tant that the floor around the urinals be impervious, preferably nonslip, and that it slope to the urinals. The walls, floors, ceilings, and toilet stalls should have smooth surfaces to facilitate cleaning and be nonodor absorbing. Odors either of decaying organic matter or of deodorizing blocks should be absent. Thorough daily cleaning should be a must. Dressing rooms should be adequately ventilated. Lunchroom service.-The growth of the lunchroom service during recent years has created demands for space and services not available in most of the older and many new school buildings. In many cases the lunchrooms have been put in the basement or other poorly adapted areas. If the schools expect to provide lunch service they should make plans to meet the most rigid existing State and/or city sanitary requirements for commercial caterers. In too many cases verminproof storage with proper temperature controls is not available. A study by the Cleanliness Bureau1 on sanitary facilities in 1949 reported that less than one-half of the schools in America have acceptable sanitary and washing facilities. Conditions were generally worse in the States having the poorer buildings and having less funds for operating costs. One State reported that not more than 10 percent of its schools were equipped with adequate sanitary facilities, another that only 25 percent of its schools had adequate hand-washing facilities. School officials felt that specific attention should be given to the im provement of sanitary facilities. School officials also report that REA programs had made it possible for many rural schools to provide running water and other desirable sanitary facilities. It was generally felt that all schools should have running water, water flush toilets, hot and cold water for wash basins, and shower-bath facilities, and should provide soap, towels, and toilet paper. Many of the older washrooms are poorly planned and poorly located. Preventive Sanitation Every school building should be designed for sanitary service. An examination of (Continued on page 125) 1 Report on a Pilot Questionnaire Addressed to School Administrators in 48 States. Cleanliness Bureau, 11 West Forty-second Street, New York City. p. 3. Simpler Reading Materials Needed for 50,000,000 Adults by Homer Kempfer, Specialist for General Adult and Post-High-School Education Plenty of other evidence points up the need for easy materials at the sixth-grade level or below. 1. Nearly one-seventh of our adults age 25 and above have not gone beyond the fourth grade. 2. Nearly one-half of all adults have not finished more than the ninth grade. Because of forgetting and other reasons, adults usually read comfortably two or three grades below their last grade of schooling. 3. Two-thirds of our people never frequent libraries-partly because the bulk of material contained therein is too difficult for them. 4. Annual sales of adult trade books never exceed one for every four adults. Only 25 percent of our population read books, as against 50 percent magazines, and 95 percent newspapers. 5. Easy-to-read magazines are mously popular. is in intermediate material of diverse content easy enough for those who have only a modicum of reading skill. This dearth of material endangers the skills of those adults who have learned to read only at the second, third, or or fourth-grade level. Reading skills, like other language skills, must be maintained and, if at a low level, must be improved for efficient use. Several million adults, aside from the outright illiterates, are too weak in reading skill to profit even from tabloids. Much of this represents either failure to acquire sufficient skill or deterioration of reading skills once possessed. The shortage of easy reading materials is a major contributing cause of both. The increased effectiveness of advertising, the enlargement of markets, and the general improvement of both vocational and general competence which could result from making all adults functionally literate is incalculably great. Much of this need for materials is in the nonfiction field as indicated by answers to this question: "How acute is the need for more nonfiction reading material for adults who can read only at the third-, fourth-, or fifth-grade levels adults who cannot handle normal 'adult' materials of eighthgrade level or higher?" The answers and number of times mentioned: Little, 15; moderate, 10; considerable, 18; great, 12; no answer, 1. The fields of needed material were explored by another question: "In what subject fields is the need for materials of low and intermediate difficulty most acute?" Health__ Frequency of mention enor Subject Citizenship 23 Homemaking-. 20 Family life and parent education. Science and technology- 19 18 17 A growing amount of instructional material is being written for adult illiterates including several items produced by the Literacy Education Project recently sponsored by the Office of Education. The shortage 1 See SCHOOL LIFE, 32:74, February 1950. Arts and crafts. Intercultural Public speaking. The best answer, of course, is to eliminate illiteracy entirely and to raise reading skills to full adult level both among adults and the stream of youth passing the compulsory school ages each year. This would (1) require more money for buildings and teachers to extend and improve our elementary education so that youth could not grow up in illiteracy and (2) an energetic literacy campaign among our millions of illiterate adults. Another answer, partial at best, is to prepare and distribute materials of diverse content, suitable for adults of low reading ability. Preparation of materials, while requir ing skills not widely found, may be the easier problem. Word lists, readability formulas, and a number of other tools developed by research make it possible for a writer with reasonably good language facility to learn to write at a given grade level without sacrificing an appealing style. Adaptation of materials to lower grade levels can also be learned. Reading experts have already helped some government departments, newspapers, and other publishers to reduce the difficulty of their publications. Most of this, however, has been a reduction from the difficult technical to the average level; little of it has benefited the below-average reader. Enough simplification has been done, however, to demonstrate that it is practicable. Distribution seems to be the key problem. Most of the market is not organized for mass sale as is true of the textbook market. Only a very small percentage of illiterate adults are in literacy classes each year. Unless the materials can be given away, mass sale (Continued on page 127) Rising Enrollments in Nonpublic Schools by Rose Marie Smith, Educational Statistician Research and Statistical Service ONPUBLIC elementary and secondary school enrollments increased by 24 percent between the school year 1937-38, a normal prewar year, and the current year, 1949-50. Three and a half million children are enrolled in nonpublic schools today. This is about 12 percent of the 29,000,000 pupils enrolled in all elementary and secondary schools. Perhaps more significant than the rise in actual numbers is the increasing proportion of all children enrolled in nonpublic schools. During the school year 1937-38 nonpublic school enrollments constituted 9.5 percent of the 28,854,121 pupils enrolled in all schools. Twelve years later, in 1949-50, nonpublic schools enrolled 11.8 percent of the 29,000,000 total. Should the trend of the past 12 years continue, it is expected that by the school year 1959-60, enrollments in nonpublic schools will exceed 5,000,000 and will constitute about 13.6 percent of the total enrollments in elementary and secondary schools. Historical data on enrollments in both public and nonpublic elementary and secondary schools biennially from 1925-26 to 1947-48 and forecasts of enrollments for each year from 1950 to 1960 are presented in table 1. Nonpublic Elementary Schools The proportion of children enrolled in nonpublic elementary schools has shown a slow but steady increase during the past 25 years. This year 2,754,000 children are enrolled in these schools, 12.1 percent of the total number of elementary pupils, compared with 9.3 percent in 1926. Catholic schools account for aproximately 93 percent of all nonpublic elementary school enrollments. The high postwar birth rates and the increasing proportion of children attending nonpublic elementary schools indicate that about 4,000,000 children will be enrolled in these schools by 1960. Table 3 gives enrollments and enrollment forecasts for public and nonpublic elementary schools. Nonpublic Secondary Schools The nonpublic secondary school is highly responsive to the economic conditions of the Nation. This was demonstrated during the depression of the 1930's when the proportion of secondary school pupils enrolled in nonpublic schools dropped from 8.8 percent in 1927-28 to 6.3 percent in 1933-34. The school year 1939-40 marked the beginning of an upward trend in enrollments in these schools which reflected improved economic conditions. This trend is still in progress and, during the current school year, 10 percent of all secondary pupils are enrolled in nonpublic schools. In contrast, public secondary school enrollments, having reached a high of 6,635,337 in 1939-40, began a decline which is still continuing. Enrollments in public secondary schools this year are 16 percent below their 1939-40 peak. Nonpublic secondary school enrollments increased 34 percent during the same 10-year period. The impact of the sharp increase in postwar birth rates is not expected to affect the secTable 3.-Enrollments in Public and Nonpublic Secondary Schools Biennially From 1926 to 1948, and Forecasts of Enrollments for Each Year From 1950 to 1960 3,068 597,751 100.0 THREE PRESIDENTS met in Washington recently to talk over the work and accomplishments of the Future You Bringing the Smithsonian to Your Pupils by Elinor B. Waters Service, and the Astrophysical Observatory-do not have exhibits for the public. Here are a few examples of the photographs you could get from the Institution: YOU DON'T HAVE TO be in Washington logical Area, the International Exchange to view the exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution. This private foundation under governmental guardianship, with its variety of exhibits of scientific, historical, and cultural importance, sells photographs of a large number of its exhibits. If the Institution already has taken a picture of the exhibit you desire, 8- by 10-inch glossy prints cost 40 cents each; if no picture of it has been taken, the charge is $1.65 for the first picture and 40 cents for each additional print. In general, any permanent exhibit can be photographed which is not copyrighted. Altogether there are 10 bureaus of the Smithsonian Institution. Six of them the United States National Museum, the National Air Museum, the National Collection of Fine Arts, the Freer Gallery of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Zoological Park-have public exhibits; the other four-the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Canal Zone Bio UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM includes six departments, five of which have public exhibits. History Department has pictures of busts, portraits, statues, masks, and scenes of historical importance. Its collection includes pictures of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Samuel F. B. Morse, Ulysses S. Grant and his family, Elias Howe, and the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. The original Star Spangled Banner, the desk at which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a face mask of Lincoln, and Dolly Madison's sewing table are found in this depart ment and have been photographed. The Department also has pictures of scientists including Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac New ton, and Joseph Priestley; period costumes; and dresses of the President's wives (or other official White House hostesses) from Martha Washington to Eleanor Roosevelt. Engineering and Industries Department has several packets of photographs on the following subjects which it can lend to teachers or sell individually at the regular rate of 40 cents a photograph: American inventors, American inventions, land transportation, water transportation, pioneer steamboats, and typewriters. The Department also has pictures on wood technology, agricultural industries and manufactures, and textiles. For example, pictures of unusual coverlets, old models of sewing machines, and cork exhibits are available. Anthropology Department's photographs include exhibits of human skulls showing the brain surgery performed by early Indians; the Herbert Ward African Sculptures, which are portrait sculptures of Cen |