Babies and Pay

Like most other classes of U. S. Labor, the nation's schoolteachers are currently hopeful that the Federal Government will help them in disputes arising between them and their employers. Last week the U. S. Supreme Court handed down a pair of rulings that seriously impaired such hopes.

P:During the Depression, many a school board slashed salaries which teachers believed were guaranteed by contract. The West New York, N. J. Board of Education in 1933 ordered reductions ranging from 10% to 15%. Principal J. E. Dransfield of Hudson Heights Grammar School has since been conducting a "friendly" legal campaign for 95 of his fellow West New York teachers to determine whether their contracts were binding under the State's Tenure Law of 1909. The cuts were last week finally upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled: "The Act of 1909 . . . was but a regulation of the conduct of the board and not a term of a continuing contract of indefinite duration with the individual teacher."

P:In November 1934, Mrs. Catharine Ulrich Kabatt was told to take a two-year leave from her duties as an Elmira, N. Y., high-school mathematics teacher because she was expecting a baby. Two months after her blue-eyed son was born, she unsuccessfully demanded to be put back to work. Although she is now teaching in a grade school, her lawyer husband Anthony has carried through the New York courts a suit for the pay she would have earned during her compulsory leave. Last week he carried it for the second time to the U. S. Supreme Court, which again refused him a rehearing.

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