Mendota High School - Atodnem Yearbook (Mendota, IL)

Page 13 text:

,N was necessary to get what we have, before we can get what we must have. The time is close for decisive movement in new directions. We have distributed ourselves rather broadly over the ground, now we must strike our roots deeper into the soil and we must grow taller. Our work claims two more additions to the main building very imperatively, but quite as loudly it demands that some of our present departments shall be better equipped. This is especially true in the commercial and manual training de- partments. We ought to have at least a thousand dollars at once for our library. We could spend it wisely and profitably this year in books which are needed to reinforce our work. The same might be said of apparatus. We need a new department of physical education with a competent instructor in charge, to include the girls as well as the boys, and this course should be made compulsory for every able-bodied student. We have no need for more students. In fact we might well dispense with some of the foolish ones we have so that the more serious ones might have more attention and wider swing. It is no reflection on the instructional force to say that there are some students who might well spend more time in inten- sive study that they may learn to bear the strongest kind of hand in genuine school work, in real school leadership. The time has come to determine that we will pursue a very conservative course about attempting more enterprises and a more aggressive course toward the strengthening of thoseeourses we have already undertaken. We want the stimulating atmosphere of hard and deep scholarship here in even fuller measure than we have had it. I can say these things without effort and with courage, because I know that the better and overwhelming sentiment of the school and community accords with them. I am quite sure that there would be no dissent from the proposition that what has heretofore been 'done was, i11 the main, well doneg that the school need abut no part of the rational pleasures with which it- salts and spices its workg but that it shall stand for order, for!-steadiness and stability, for deeper study and yet higher scholarship, and 'for a foremost place in the high school work of our state. If this is to be done it involves thinking in some new directions, it calls for the setting up of some new stand- ards, it means a new sense of gratitude and a new measure of devotion, and it will be accomplished by a splendid and common impulse acting upo11 our life from one end to the other. Are we all ready and anxious for it? Then let us go forward and upward. S. J. Haight, President of the Board of Education. of ' u N 'ine

Page 12 text:

Our Growth HERE is no one associated with the High School, not even the last freshman to enter, who has not seen abundant evidence of the enlargement and improvement of the beautiful home in which he lives. One does not have to go back far-it seems as though it were only the other day-to the time when we were divided into two buildings, both entirely out of date, when there was not a foot of paved street in the city, when there were numerous board and cinder walks where the cement walks now are, and when there were white picket fences in front of many of our best homes, that strangers were prone to think primitive enough. These have all given way to a plan that in extent and utility is not often excelled in such small cities. Students have multiplied more rapidly than the accommodations of the High School have enlarged. The time can very easily be recalled when a new student was a prize of such precious quality that there was great temptation to seek him out and every inducement was put forward to persuade him to come in. No one could be turned away for anything short of felony, for the thought of reducing the number by even one was intolerable. But now the streets are black with youth tramping toward our new center of education, and the trouble in finding places and providing instruction for them brings on the wrinkles and turns the hair prematurely white. Various citizens have had their activities so stirred with harrowing expectations that they must lie awake nights thinking out impossible prefects for conditions which never arise, and break in upon the president of the board of education at unseeming hours in the gray of the morning with demands that could never be, and happily never have to be met. Not only has the plant enlarged, and not only have students multiplied, but the work has increased and intensified commensurately, and very likely it has done even better than that. The instructional force has been doubled in four years, the courses of study have been arranged to meet the require- ments of the most ambitious or ingenious high school student. Now, in all seriousness, conditions have arisen which call for reflection. The work of a factory may be measured by the size of the buildings and the number of its workmen, but the work of a school is not gauged by such standards. It was important for us to create a constituency and to gain sup- port, for we could not have followed the course we did without doing so. It Eight

Page 14 text:

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