Consolidated Rural Schools (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Consolidated Rural Schools The most important work before this department upon the advent of statehood was the organization of district schools in the new counties of the State. The rural district school is the foundation of all our work. Thousands of our citizens will never go to any other school, and if there should be no district school in reach of them they may never go to any school at all. Considering the fact that only a few of our children, comparatively speaking, will ever attend a higher state institution of learning, it becomes our plain duty to see that there is a district school in reach of every child of every color in the State, and that these schools be made as thorough as it is possible to make them. The free public-school system in Oklahoma is the glory of our State, and the rural district school is the foundation and hope of the entire system. The work of organizing the new counties into convenient districts has been carried rapidly forward and is now nearly completed. At the present time 2,200 school districts, by actual count, have been organized in the forty-one counties carved out of that part of the State formerly known as Indian Territory, and fully as many schoolhouses have been built and occupied. In this part of Oklahoma I urged the formation of large school districts by the county superintendent, so that larger buildings and better schools might be made possible. In this way a plan of consolidation was effected without holding an election in which its fate might be uncertain. Many of these schools began work with three or four rooms and with the same number of teachers. In these new districts we enrolled not less than 140,000 children who never entered a public schoolhouse before, and a vast majority of whom never attended a school of any kind a single day. We think this is a good showing, and look upon it as the best and most far-reaching result of statehood for our people. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hund