"We Just Went to Sleep"

There is really nothing strange about the teen-agers of Pleasant Grove, Texas, but they were behaving in a strange way last week. Instead of the usual signs--"Caution--No Brakes" "Don't Laugh Mister. Your Daughter May Be Inside!" --they had daubed their jalopies with the earnest words: "We Want Our Schools." The slogan was cried at special mass meetings, chanted through the streets in impromptu parades. But in spite of all the agitation, the doors of Pleasant Grove's six schools remained firmly closed all week, and no one, from the superintendent on down, seemed to know how to get them open again.

The closing of the schools was perfectly legal. To all intents and purposes, the citizens of Pleasant Grove had done the deed themselves--but they had done it unintentionally. What they had really wanted to do was to place their schools under the control of their big and wealthy neighbor, Dallas, which had already taken over everything but their schools.

Bottled in Bonds. For some months Pleasant Grove had been considering the transfer Many people were convinced that if Dallas would only take over, better schools and lower taxes would result. Furthermore, the Dallas school board hinted that it might eventually be willing to annex Pleasant Grove. Then the Dallas board began running into trouble with its new $24 million bond issue. By Texas law, the Dallas district could not expand an inch until all its bonds were sold.

While waiting for that happy day Pleasant Grove's own school board went on with its regular work. For one thing it chose a site for a new high school, and in the process began condemning the land of several prominent property owners. The property owners promptly decided that the only way to stop this sort of thing was to bring the annexation issue to a head. They began circulating petitions calling for a special election, hired a hillbilly band to rally support. When election day came, a few interested citizens dutifully trooped to the polls. By a slim margin they voted to abolish the Pleasant Grove school district and, with it, the Pleasant Grove school board.

Chief Without Indians. Confronted with the election results, the school board felt it no longer had the authority to run the schools. Its last official act was to close them down. With that, the rest of the town began to wake up. "We just went to sleep," cried Pastor Randall Odom of the First Baptist Church. "We didn't think it could happen."

Nevertheless it had happened, and, to everyone's surprise, the town's 4,000 schoolkids didn't like it at all. Instead of taking a holiday, they held mock funerals for their district, lowered the high-school flag to half-mast, smeared red paint over the house of one of the leading abolitionists. Meanwhile Superintendent Dale Douglas ("I'm a chief without Indians!") began appealing to the county superintendent for help, and was told that the county could only take over small communities with 125 students or less At week's end the citizens of Pleasant Grove had but one course left: to call another election and vote their school district back into existence.

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