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Lost Opportunities in the Schools
North Miami Beach, Florida 1-24-2000 Aaron H. Schectman
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on issues, ideas and reflections on the times. Published now and
then. Opinions pro or con are welcome.
LOST OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SCHOOLS
I note with interest in the New York Times this morning that schools have
been discovered to be in use beyond the traditional opening and closing
times (p. 1). Opportunities to maximize the intent and potentiality of
school buildings have been lost since the first schoolrooms were built.
First, the model of the one-room schoolhouse is still with us despite the
huge thousand plus populations that attend it. These buildings are intended
for little more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. We recognize that the
school and its staff serve as "in locus parentis" during school hours. With
the additional need to extend school hours the parental job of the school is
also extended. Nurturing children is a weighty occupation and the schools
are not built to handle it efficiently. Schools are still established to
teach many subjects by single teachers in single rooms, one teacher to many
students.
It should be obvious that most school plants sit idle from about 3:00 p.m.
to 7 or 8:00 a.m. five days a week. They are usually closed on weekends and
holidays and during Winter, Spring and summer recesses. They are limited in
scope, finances and space for anything more and are wasted rather than seen
as opportunities waiting to be seized.
Plans to extend the school day, year, and use are defeated by custom,
inertia and lack of vision. If people want classes in a subject late at
night I will find you a teacher for that group. However, they will go
begging for space despite empty classrooms at that time. Schools of
tomorrow need to be built as multi-purpose structures so they may be used 24
hours a day every day throughout the year. Storage space for equipment,
projects, and personal use for teachers and students need to be planned.
Nurseries for the children of teachers and students need to be included.
Auditoriums, cafeterias, lecture halls, small counseling rooms as well as
laboratories can be housed in the same school building on a campus that
allows extension into the outside world. Why not, at the same time, build
them to be ornaments and monuments to our civil society? Why must schools be
so little used?
Carol's Evaluation: 9 1/2 out of 10.
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