The following table gives the cost of executing the law for the school year beginning in September, 1898, and ending in June or July, 1899: on Account of XXII. Table showing Salary Reimbursements XXII. Table showing Salary Reimbursements, etc. Concluded. While many teachers who receive additions to their salaries from the State are fairly entitled to them, it is a question in some instances whether the State's help has brought to the schools the added efficiency intended. The State has provided no authoritative way of assuring itself of a satisfactory use of its aid. How far it may be expedient to insist that the persons whose salaries are paid in part by the State shall first be approved by the State, is an open question. In the single case of teachers employed in training schools connected with the normal schools, teachers paid full salaries by their respective towns and cities and additional sums by the State, their appointment must be satisfactory to the State as well as to the school committees. There is no question but that superintendents of schools, if wisely selected and entrusted with the power of nomination, are more likely to make good selections of teachers than school committees; and, therefore, that towns with superintendents are more likely than towns without to make effective use of the State's contributions to teachers' salaries. This is one of several reasons why the State should now make the employment of a superintendent of schools universal and permanent. XXIII. EXPENSES OF TEXT-BOOKS AND SUPPLIES. Table showing the Sum appropriated and the Rate per and supplies the past year was $1.50 for each pupil in the average membership. Were the cost based on each pupil in the total membership, it would be only $1.24. The expenditure for text-books and supplies is determined, in first or original purchases thereof, by a number of pupils not far from the probable total membership for the year; the consumption of such material, however, is determined by a number not far from the average membership for the year. The surplus of one year or period means a reduced purchase for the next year or period; so that, in the long run, the average membership proves to be the most satisfactory basis for the table. There is no question but that the schools are more promptly, fully and satisfactorily as well as more cheaply equipped with textbooks and supplies under the free text-book law than ever before, or than they would be likely to be to-day if there were no such law. EXPENSE OF CONVEYING CHILDREN. XXIV. Table showing the Amount expended for transporting Children to School for the Past Ten Years. Significance of Table XXIV. — Expenditures for the conveyance of children measure approximately the extent of the movement to consolidate thinly attended schools. The money saved by such consolidation pays in part, in full, or in full with something to spare, for central schools, with better rooms, better equipment and better teachers, and for the conveyance of the children thereto. Such consolidation is not without its perplexities. The local school has been closed; conveyance for most of the children has been provided without difficulty; but here is a child, for example, in a part of the town remote or difficult of access, a child, it may be, for whom the discontinued school was by no means convenient, though with effort attainable. Now it costs as much to convey this child as a score of the rest. The cost is disproportionate, makes a sad inroad upon the often scant appropriation, looks ugly in the annual report. Nor does it help the situation, if the parent so tenaciously stands on his legal right to convenient schooling for his child, or on his right to consideration as a tax payer, or on both, as to refuse to make those possible concessions that his isolation should in equity prompt. It is hardly surprising that now and then a school committee shrinks from providing the expensive conveyance that would solve the problem. The result is, that a parent whose legal duty it is to send his child to school cannot discharge it; a school committee bound by law not only |
