Except Saturday

For four days last week, up to 20,000 of New York City's 212,000 high-school students deserted their classrooms for an unseemly orgy of picketing, riotous parading, catcalling and general defiance of the school board, Mayor O'Dwyer, and several hundred New York cops and truant officers. The only civic group that could conceivably have been pleased by all this were the demonstrators' teachers. And, in the circumstances, they were keeping their voices down.

The handbills and placards said that the demonstrating students were out to help the high-school teachers get more money. Gist of the teachers' demands: $600-a-year raises all around (on salaries ranging from $2,500 to $5,325*) to meet rising living costs. Until they got the raises, the teachers had announced, they would boycott all extracurricular activities. They would refuse to coach athletics, direct school plays, advise the editors of student papers and yearbooks, supervise student clubs or chaperon school proms.

When Mayor O'Dwyer decided to approve a $7,000,000 allocation to boost most high-school salaries by $250 a year, all other salaries by $150, the teachers shouted "pin money," and the boycott continued.

Good Boys. Last week, with their dances and baseball games, operettas and track meets called off, students decided to join their teachers' cause. And so one morning in Brooklyn, 1,000 boys & girls cut classes to parade in protest around the New Utrecht High School. The same day, 400 boys from another Brooklyn school marched across Manhattan Bridge to demonstrate before City Hall. There they met the Mayor's education aide, who was willing to talk to them. "We had a short chat," said he later, "and they returned to school. That shows they are good boys."

But next day, the boys & girls were not so tractable. In every borough but Queens, principals gave the same reports: students were walking out. By 9:30 a.m., hundreds of them had started to march on City Hall, and as they went, hundreds more joined them. By 11, a good 3,000 of them were yelling outside the Mayor's office.

The police were caught a little off balance at first, but they threw up barricades, called reinforcements until they were 200 strong. The students jeered and whistled. "We Want Willie!" they chanted at Mayor O'Dwyer's windows. They waved posters with the legend "While student activities cease, we refuse to grant O'Dwyer peace," and shouted, "We want a raise for our teachers."

This sort of thing went on for two more days. The class-cutting spread until about 10% of the high-school enrollment was involved. Some stayed home, some went to the movies, others staged minor demonstrations around their own schools. But for most of the class-cutters, the target was City Hall.

Pins & Needles. Not all of the milling about was good-natured. Some students opened their lunch boxes and pelted police with apples and sandwiches. A few hoodlums jabbed pins & needles into horses' flanks. At one point, some of them trampled in the roof of a city-owned car and then tipped it over. Then they overturned two others.

Who were the ringleaders? Or were there any? Not even the police had found out. They arrested only a few and held them for questioning. In one batch of three, there was a Boy Scout, an altar boy and a member of the Red-tinged Young Progressives of America.

Seeds of Chaos. As the days passed, the city wondered what to think. To the Communist Daily Worker, the strike was a "heroic" demonstration. To the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram & the Sun, the students were sowing the seeds of "chaos." Superintendent of Schools William Jansen said that the strikers could not be "condemned too severely." The New York Post claimed that the officials were taking it all too seriously. Mayor O'Dwyer was plainly exasperated. He threatened to cancel the $7,000,000 appropriation, demanded that the Board of Education start a complete investigation.

The students who were questioned by the press only added to the confusion. Some said their teachers had encouraged them; others said that it was all their own idea. Meanwhile the High School Teachers Association urged its members to "restrain pupils." The A.F.L. Teachers Guild hoped that students would postpone demonstrations until "after school hours."

On the fifth day there was no demonstration at all. That happened to be a Saturday, so there were no classes to cut and thus, perhaps, no fun in marching on City Hall.

* Other big-city maximums for high-school teachers: Chicago, $5,160; Los Angeles, $5,210; Detroit, $4,883; Philadelphia, $4,400.

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