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MOST

SANITARY CONDITIONS IN OUR SCHOOL-HOUSES.

By J. N. HURTY.

OST of the school-houses in Indiana are very unsanitary. There are many very excellent buildings which satisfactorily meet sanitary requirements, but the majority of our schoolhouses have been constructed, and are conducted without the slightest, or, at the best, with very little regard for the health of the children.

I will describe the school-house at Sunman, Ripley county, as a type of the majority of Indiana's school-houses. This building is a two-story brick with a vestibule. There are two rooms, one directly above the other The stairs are steep and winding and difficult to climb. Ventilation is solely by windows and doors; warming is affected by box stoves placed in center of the rooms. The outhouses are dilapidated and noisome and far worse than none. The water supply is from a well of doubtful purity. The desks are antiquated, in bad condition and all of the same size. They are too small for many of the pupils and too large for some. The vestibule, stairs and both rooms are dingy, with dirty, curtainless windows, and the floors are covered at least one quarter inch deep with dirt. Remnants of lunch are abundantly distributed about the room, but especially around the box-stove. A watercooler placed on a stool near the door, supplies drinking water and the drip therefrom mingles with the dirt on the floor to form a veritable mud-puddle. The air, of necessity, is bad. In the winter time, it is always so in school-rooms which depend upon windows and doors for ventilation.

When I entered this school, the teacher had before him, a class of four bright girls. What the subject of the lesson was, I do not know, but I heard him ask the question-"Honor thy father and thy mother; to what emotions of the human mind, does this appeal?" Why try to educate in morals amidst such surroundings? Consider the full import of the situation-the state compels the children to attend this school, and places them amidst dirty, unwholesome, and forbidding surroundings. Their vitality, instead of being used upon their books and in mental effort, is largely expended in resisting the evils of imperfect ventilation, imperfect heating, imperfect lighting. This means that a certain percentum -not small-of the public school money is wasted. Then, in order to waste more money and further wrong the children, the school-house is allowed, in the name of economy, to become dirty and foul. This threatens the children with disease and death. Threatens homes with sorrow and

dismemberment. The home is the very foundation of Christian society, and to threaten it in even the remotest degree, is a crime.

At Freedom, Owen county, is a two-story, fourroom, frame school-house. At the time of my visit, it was in miserable condition. The rains had washed away the earth from before the front steps and formed a little gully, three feet deep and four feet wide. Upon inquiry of the trustee, it was found he had no thought of attending to this condition and giving the children a proper and decent approach to their school. They were expected to climb over and through this ditch all winter long, thus, in instances, getting wet feet, soiled clothes and running the risk of bodily injury. Every room was dingy. Strips of paper hung from the ceilings, blackboards were badly chipped, desks were old, dirty, of improper shape and size, and dilapidated. The windows were curtainless and grimy: the box-stoves were cracked and broken; the stovepipes were sagging and almost ready to fall down, thus inviting fire to threaten the children's lives. The cross lights from the curtainless windows twisted, pulled and strained the eyes of the children. They, in trying to get a right light upon their books, assumed all manner of positions, thus twisting spines and moulding themselves in deformity. Two most miserable, dilapidated, tumble-down, noisome, outhouses, were standing in the school-yard back of the school-house-monuments to indecency and immorality. Honor thy father and thy mother, was also probably taught at this school. But why, I ask, should we expect the precept to take hold amid such surroundings?

A country school-house I inspected last summer, was filled with sheep and hogs. I wondered these animals would go near this building, it was so desolate and mean. If these were isolated instances, there would be no warrant to detail them, but alas, they are types of conditions which may be seen in every county in Indiana. At Monon it was necessary to provide for the high school outside the school-house. From one

of the trustees, an inside room in a business block was rented. This room was forty-eight feet long, twenty feet wide and thirteen feet high; lighted by two narrow windows at the west end, and a patch of skylight over one corner of the east end. There were fifty pupils in the room. The air was foul, and one half the room was so dark that two coal-oil lamps were used to emit their sickly yellow light behind the pupils, making shadows

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