East High School - Eastonian Yearbook (Kansas City, MO)

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W. V. CLEMENT Principal

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 ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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To the Students of East High Seliool At the close of my first year as principal of East High School I am glad of the opportunity to express my sincere appreciation of the unreserved support I have received from the student body, the faculty, and the patrons of the school. I have never worked with a more responsive group of young people. The wholehearted co-operation of the faculty has been most gratifying. My contacts with the school patrons, though limited, have been uniformly pleasant and helpful. Our year together has renewed and strengthened my abiding faith in American youth and in that distinctively American institution, the public schools. This year has been one to test the fundamental soundness of both. “Ours may be the tragic privilege of living in the greatest military crisis since Napoleon; the greatest economic crisis since Adam Smith; the greatest social crisis since the fall of the Roman Empire,” said Eric B. Johnston. We have seen in increasing numbers our graduates and even our active students enter the military services and have read in the press frequent reports of their daring achievements and occasional untimely sacrifice. The multiplied demands made upon us all by the war program have been faced with courage, intelligence and enthusiasm. No essential or even desirable activity has been abandoned, but all phases of school life have been reshaped to meet developments current and to come. Pre-induction courses have been set up, adequately staffed, and filled with carefully selected groups. The Victory Corps, the Federal war plan for schools, has been integrated with an expanded program of student participation in school affairs through an extension of the work of the student council. Faculty-sponsored council committees charged with getting specific jobs done through personal work and home room co-operation have proven highly efficient. All curricular and extra-curricular activities have been pointed up to meet the criterion set forth by the Educational Policies Commission: “In the secondary schools, every young person must be regarded a reservist in preparation for the armed forces or for the war industries.” Though our immediate task is winning the war, and we have willingly joined mobilizing the schools of the nation to aid in bringing this to pass, through the murk of materialism of the moment, there must be kept alight the glowing idealism which has brought America safely to this day, confident that the American way of life is worth preserving at any sacrifice. And when the war is won, we must be prepared to enter upon the perhaps more arduous task of establishing for ourselves and for all the world a just and lasting peace. Faithfully, W. W. Clkment.