Annual Reports of County Superintendents of Common Schools
This article originally appeared in Exchange,
a newsletter
published by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
(Volume 41, Numbers 2 & 3, 1999) It is
the 20th in a series of articles titled Researching
Community History. The series highlights
the Society's resources available to local
historians. It was written by Tom McKay,
retired local history coordinator for the
Wisconsin Historical Society.
The last half of the 20th century witnessed
many areas of rapid change on the local, state
and national levels. Schools are among the
most important institutions in any community's
history, and the consolidation of schools brought
great change to Wisconsin communities. Local
historians can establish a baseline of information
about elementary school education prior to
consolidation and elimination of one-room schools
through research in the Annual Reports of County
Superintendents of Common Schools. These reports
are found in the archives at
the Wisconsin Historical Society
as Series 675. The reports cover the years
1940-1965.
County superintendents of schools gathered data from each individual school district in their respective counties and compiled the information in summary fashion on the annual report forms provided by the state government. As a result, the reports offer an overview of education in one-room schools and graded schools in a particular county rather than a profile of any individual school. The reports focus largely on a tabulation of numbers of school-age children in a county; statistics describing teacher preparation and experience; and financial data summarizing receipt of public monies and disbursements for expenses such as teacher salaries, transportation costs, maintenance, utilities, capital expenditures and operations.
The superintendents' reports can help establish a context for major changes in education at the local level. Each report indicates, for its county, the number of: one-room school districts; state graded school districts without a high school; and districts with both high school and elementary school grades. Researchers might be surprised to learn that in 1941 an area such as Green County had 103 one-room schools. Two state graded schools, one union high school, and four districts with high school and elementary grades comprised the remainder of the county's schools.
The number of rural schools gradually declined
during the 1940s and 1950s, but 81 one-room
schools remained in Green County in 1959. The
decline in the number of rural schools reflected
changing attitudes about education and changing
school populations as farms grew larger and
the number of families in a rural area grew
smaller. In 1954, two of Lafayette County's
83 one-room schools had only four
pupils each. Closings of such schools happened
throughout Wisconsin every year.
While information about students from the
superintendents' reports address in general
terms the number of pupils in county schools,
a more detailed picture of teachers emerges
from the documents. The reports recorded the
length of time teachers had served their present
schools. The 1941 data for Burnett County reveals
that 17 of 44 rural school teachers
were in their first year at their present schools,
11 were in their second year, and eight
in their third year. However, this revealed
mobility among teaching positions rather than
a corps of new teachers. In this same group
of 44 teachers, the majority had more
than five years of teaching experience and
nine of the 44 had 10 years or more
in the classroom.
In addition to teacher tenure, the annual
reports offer information about teacher salaries
and preparation. In Burnett County, nearly
all of the elementary school teachers in the
early l940s made less than $100 per month.
During the same time period, almost all of
Milwaukee County's teachers made more than
$100 per month with some paid more than $250
per month. In the early 1940s, superintendents'
annual reports included a table charting the
numbers of years of education beyond the eighth
grade completed by teachers in rural and graded
schools. By far the greatest number had training
that encompassed one or two years of education
at a county normal school for teachers. However,
virtually every county had exceptions. In 1941
Marquette County had 51 rural school
teachers including one with four full years
of college and one with only one year of high
school. By the 1950s, the reports follow changing
expectations for teachers and record how many
years of education teachers had beyond high
school.
The reports hold a variety of clues about
the day-to-day business of education in one-room
and graded schools. For example, in 1941 Marquette
County's 51 rural schools had an average
of 380 books in their libraries, included 16
schools with no playground equipment, and numbered
14 schools with radios. Any local historical
society conducting an oral history project
about rural schools could find this type of
information useful in formulating interview
questions about day-to-day activities in a
one-room school. The reports also give hints
about special events. The 1941 reports for
their respective counties show that all eleven
rural schools in Forest County sponsored school
fairs while none of the 30 rural schools
in neighboring Oneida County held school fairs.
The Annual Reports of the County Superintendents
of Common Schools are filed in alphabetical
order by year. This means that the reports
for any given county are spread throughout
the 31 archives boxes that house this record
series. The organization of Series 675 means
that researchers wishing to access all of the
reports for a given county from 1940 through
1965 would need to do so by using them at the
Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. Historians
interested in reviewing a county's reports
for selective years could request to have those
records transferred for use to one of the13
Area Research
Centers throughout the state.
While the reports cannot provide in-depth pictures
of any individual school, they do offer an
excellent context for understanding change
in one-room and graded elementary school education
on the local level during the middle of the
20th century.
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