Virginia Schools in the Great Depression

How did Virginians shape policies that determined how the burdens of the Depression were spread among the schools?

Introduction to the Module

The onset of the Depression may have felt like some kind of natural disaster, like a storm or flood, but in fact the decisions made by policy-makers, businesses, and citizens greatly influenced how these burdens were spread among schools and across society. By identifying the processes by which these decisions were made, and in particular how Virginians sought to influence these policies, this lesson plan explores a historical example of how public opinion shapes government policy-making.

The question of who should bear the burden of the Depression was partly a matter of public opinion. As indicated in the first two pieces of evidence in this lesson plan, Virginia’s educators wanted to persuade the public that schools were not receiving the resources needed to fulfill their mission of educating young people. By claiming public support for protecting school budgets, as in Document 1, or by comparing Virginia’s low standing relative to other southern states, as in Document 2, these materials sought to persuade readers that schools needed to avoid any cuts in their budgets.

A comparison of school financing for the period before, during, and after the Depression, as shown in Document 3, indicates that the Depression significantly affected the amount of money available for schools. This decrease in funding affected many aspects of schooling, as both state and local (county or city) budgets felt the affects of reduced tax revenue. As indicated in Document 4, most of the income for schools was generated at the local level, through the taxes paid to city and county governments. The income received from the state was only about one-half of this amount, with the remained coming from loans, bonds, and other sources. The loss in tax revenue due to failed businesses, unemployment, farm foreclosures, and bank collapses were all crucial factors in shaping how the Depression affected the resources available to local school districts.

As indicated by the school expenses chart in Document 4, school districts looking for places to cut spending faced difficult decisions. The largest share, the category of instruction, included salary payments to teachers, textbooks, and classroom supplies. While school officials tried to make cuts in areas that would not affect pupils and teachers as directly, this burden of expenses meant that budget cuts usually affected classroom instruction.

One consequence of the Depression was to provoke public discussion of how the burden of funding schools should be distributed among the population and across society. Although cuts in salaries were a common response, as suggested by Document 5, but these actions provoked protests, as indicated by Documents 6 and 7, which were letters representing teachers’ views published in local newspapers. Federal funding of education was limited to a few special programs, such as the provision of free lunches for the poorest children descried in Document 8. In a few cases, the crisis in public funding prompted broader discussions of the allocation of wealth and power in American society, as in Document 9, but any steps toward a more egalitarian redistribution of income failed to attract sufficient support to make real changes in the system of educational funding.

One of the most common places to save money was by reducing the school year, which meant saving the costs of paying teachers’ salaries for the additional time. As indicated by the table in Document 10, the length of the school year varied considerably acrosss Virginia during 1932/1933, the peak years of the economic crisis. As this chart indicates, however, only a minority of districts completed the mandated length of 180 days, while a sizable number had fewer than 160 days.

Decisions to reduce the length of the school provoked considerable discussion, as evident in the remaining documents in this lesson plan. At times, as in Document 11, reductions in the length of the school year were combined with other ways to decrease expenditures. As the last four documents indicate, however, shortened school years provoked the most controversy, especially as school officials explained the consequences of their decisions for students, in Document 12, students and parents organized to protest these decisions, in Documents 13 and 14, and then the school board was forced to reverse its decision. As the final article indicates, maintaining the full length of the school year came at partly at the expense of teachers, who suffered a ten percent reduction in their salaries in order to finish the 1934 school year.

These documents provide numerous examples of how the Virginians responded to the burden of the Depression on public education. Letters to the editor, organized protests, and appeals to city, county, and state officials were instruments used to shape decisions about funding public schools. While these materials demonstrate that public input could have an affect on policy-making, they also reveal the limits of such influence. Given the constraints on revenue and thus expenditures, the necessity of making cuts meant that schools faced significant reductions, regardless of the distribution of such cuts across categories such as the length of the year or the salaries of teachers. It was only with improvements in the national and state economies in the mid-1930s that schools began to recover from the impact of the Depression.