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Show Ford Foundation Launches Plan To Strengthen Utah Rural Schools A cooperative experiment by five western states Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah to strengthen education educa-tion in their small,' rural schools was announced by the Ford Foundation. Aided by Foundation grants of $742,000, the education departments depart-ments of the five states organize a western states Small Schools Project to attack the problems of schools with 200 students or less. The experiment has national significance since such schools account for a fifth of America's school children. Other actions announced by the Foundation were: A grant of $5 million to Educational Facilities Laboratories, Labora-tories, New York, for expanded support of its research and information in-formation programs on planning The Foundation's grants to the several state departments of education provide 3 -year support for research and evaluation as well as for teacher workshops and conferences. The Project's regional coordinating office will be located in Denver. Colorado has been conducting an experiment to improve small high school instruction with the assistance of a grant from the Foundation in 1960. Two other projects for small, rural schools have been supported by the Foundation and the Fund for the Advancement of Education, an independent organization of the Foundation. These are the Cat-skill Cat-skill Area Project in Small School Design, which includes 27 schools in a 3-county area of New York State, and Resources Project which covers some 150 schools in Vermont and Maine. and uses of school and college facilities. A grant of $1,250,000 to the Cleveland Foundation, for use by a new organization, Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation, Founda-tion, in supporting experimental projects on problems of the area. The grants to the education departments of the five western states participating in Western States Small Schools Project were as follows: Arizona, $105,-000; $105,-000; Colorado, $256,000; Nevada, $129,000; New Mexico, $127,000; and Utah, $125,000. There are about 1,150 small, rural schools in the five state region, with 93,000 pupils and 5,600 teachers. The Project will begin in September, 1962, with about 120 schools comprising 18,000 pupils and 1,000 teachers. At the end of the Project's third year, the majority of the small schools in the five states are expected to be included. Including today's grant, since 1956, the Foundation and the Fund have provided $1,569,833 to strengthen education in the nation's rural schools. The problem is not one merely of expanding the educational plant to accommodate growing enrollments. Education itself is undergoing revolutionary change in the deployment and grouping of pupils and teachers. The main objective of the Laboratories, consequently is to help devise the physical forms that will advance ad-vance the process of education and strengthen its quality. Although established and supported sup-ported by the Foundation, the Laboratories is an independent organization with its own board of directors and officers. The organization supports its consulting and technical services in the planning of the new school and college facilities that may serve as prototypes for improved educational construction. Also research is sponsored on the design and installation of new equipment and apparatus, with science laboratories, language laboratories and educational TV. In its first three years, the Laboratories has supported or conducted 92 projects. Examples, the planning of buildings that provide a flexible range of teaching teach-ing and learning spaces, support was given to school boards in Covina, Calif.; Flowing Wells, Arizona; and McPherson, Kans.; as well as in large cities like Chicago and New York. Examples Ex-amples of special educational structures aided by Laboratories are a school auditorium, Boulder City, Nevada, that is divisible into classrooms, and a fieldhouse in Bethesda, Maryland, that by using a geodesic dome, provides more interior space at less cost than a gymnasium of a more conventional design. As a national information center on buildings and equipment, equip-ment, the Laboratories has now distributed more than 700,000 copies of the 21 reports it has published to date. Subjects range from a study of school planning and financing to the school design de-sign aspects of instructional TV. "For some time to come, the small school is likely to continue to educate a significant part of the nation's youth. Despite our continuing efforts toward consolidation con-solidation of small units, such factors as geography, topgraphy, population sparsity, economics, make this unfeasible in many areas. Therefore, schools with small enrollments must devise other ways to overcome deficiencies defi-ciencies in faculty, financial and other resources. In attempting to improve the performance, small schools too frequently have followed organizational organi-zational practices established by large schools. The Western experiment ex-periment will seek instead to build on the inherent advantages of the small school setting for example, greater opportunities for individual instruction. Mr. Faust said the Western Project would provide a frame work to help individual schools test and adopt a range of new departures. Among these: The establishment of multiple classes, in which one teacher teaches more than one subject in the same room at the same time. The sharing between schools of special teachers in languages, mathematics and other subjects. The employment of teacher aides housewives and others from the community, to perform clerical and routine instructional tasks. The use of TV, tape recorders and films to expand a curriculum and strengthen teaching. Other methods encompassed in the experiment schelules that permit considerable variation in the length and frequency of the classes, supervised correspondence correspond-ence study, team teaching, and co-operative programs among schools to provide advanced work for able students. |
