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Show The Need For Classrooms Good facilities can contribute greatly to good education. American schools and colleges entered the post-war period with a serious physical handicap. The low level of construction during the depressed thirties and during the war had given them a big backlog of building needs at the very time they faced rising enrollments. As a result, despite the greatly increased level of educational building since the war, millions of youngsters have had to spend their days in crowded and often dangerously obsolete classrooms. The widespread inspection of public schools - prompted by the tragic parochial school fire in Chicago last year confirmed that many of the old buildings are physically hazardous. hazard-ous. We have had to "run fast to stand still" in our school building needs. From 1949 to 1958 a total of 500,000 new classrooms were built, an accomplishment to the credit of local communities and state governments. Yet at the end of that period, according to the Office of Education, there remained a shortage of 140,000 classrooms. Some qualified experts believe this figure is law by at least 60,000. In August, 1959, the Secretary Sec-retary of Health, Education and Welfare stated that, conservatively, conserva-tively, "... the number of pupils whose education is being impaired in varying degrees by the classroom shortage is about 10 million." The physical needs of higher education are no less great. Despite a high level of construction in the last 10 years, particularly par-ticularly in tax supported colleges and universities, a large proportion of existing college structures are obsolete and overcrowded. over-crowded. The new buildings needed by higher education in the next 10 years are equivalent to all of the college structures built in the previous 200 years. The total construction needs of the schools and colleges combined have been conservatively estimated at $4 billion a year for the next 10 years, or $40 billion. This is a large but an entirely manageable requirement for a nation as economically strong as the United States provided we decided that it is important to meet it. |
