Tchk, Tchk!

New York City parents flapped their newspapers in surprise at big advertisements in which a little girl was shown clinging to her mother's apron and crying : "Mama, I hate to go to school today. It's my turn to stand!" What this doleful picture actually reflected was not anybody's indignation over unseated tots but the concern of 31,000 city schoolteachers for their jobs. The Board of Education, for the first time in the history of the school system, proposed to fire 125 high-school teachers because it didn't have enough money to meet the payroll.

The teachers raised Cain. They not only asserted that New York City's schools were so "dangerously" overcrowded that no teachers could be spared--a point wrathfully denied by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia--but also stomped angrily, 1,000 strong, to the Board of Education meeting. The Board tried to placate them by electing as their new boss (to succeed the late Superintendent Harold G. Campbell) genial John E. Wade, 64, who had come up from the ranks as a city schoolteacher. Superintendent Wade tried to placate them by batting up a new scheme: instead of firing 125 teachers, retire 40 old ones. The saving would be the same, because the oldsters' salaries were higher.

Determined to oppose any dismissals whatever, the teachers denounced Mr. Wade's proposal. But the Board prepared to adopt it. Said its president, Ellsworth Buck: "There is not a single elementary school standee."

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