Mrs. Four-to-One

The woman reporter from the New Orleans States got a shock when she set out to cover her first school-board meeting. She had no sooner taken her seat than a board member snappishly ordered her to leave the room. "After that," says Mrs. Jacqueline Leonhard, 35, "I found myself cooling my heels outside whenever I was sent to cover a meeting. And I observed that other citizens were treated rudely and that there was an aura of intimidation about the whole school system." Reporter Leonhard was not the sort to stay intimidated. Her dander up, she decided to run for the school board herself. In 1948 she was elected.

Since then, things have changed in New Orleans. Last week, as the city picked its new school superintendent--James F. Redmond, longtime second in command to Chicago's Herold Hunt--it no longer had to apologize for its bad schools. The New Orleans school system is now booming as never before--largely because of the righteous wrath of the woman reporter from the States.

Case to the People. Jacqueline Leonhard, mother of two, had good reason for her wrath. Of the city's 92 school buildings, 25 were more than 50 years old, two others dated back to the 1850s, and even the newer ones were dingy, dark and dirty. In spite of mounting enrollments, the board had not built a new school in ten years, and only one building in the whole town met the specifications of the state fire marshal and the board of health. Nor had the board done anything to accommodate shifts in population: while some white schools were half empty, most of the Negro schools were operating on the two-platoon system.

Jacqueline Leonhard's first efforts to do something about all this got short shrift from her male colleagues. They not only kept voting her down ("My friends began calling me Four-to-One"), they once even walked out on her and held a caucus in the men's room. "It just burned me up," says she. "I told them that if they ever tried that again, I was going to walk right into the men's room myself and join the meeting." From that day on, the board began to realize that nothing was likely to stop Mrs. Four-to-One.

When the board finally did decide to buy a cramped plot of land and build an old-fashioned sort of school building, Member Leonhard protested. What New Orleans needed, said she, were modern schools, with plenty of room for expansion. She managed to persuade one other member to join her crusade, and the pair of them, armed with plans from Tulane's architecture school, took their case to the people. In 60 days, they made 80 different speeches. "We talked in churches, in V.F.W. halls; why, I would even talk in kitchens if I could get five women to listen to me." Eventually, Jacqueline Leonhard won out: McDonogh School No. 39, surrounded by broad playgrounds in the Gentilly area, became the first modern school in the city.

Sign to the Public. In 1950, Jacqueline Leonhard won another victory. The citizens of New Orleans became so enthusiastic about her ideas that they elected two like-minded members to serve with her. Thereupon the board made Mrs. Leonhard its first woman president, hired Architect Charles Colbert of Tulane University to head a whole new program of construction. In 1952, the city completed the revolution by electing two more pro-Leonhard members.

The city's $30 million building program is now well under way. It has built three new ultra-modern schools, has three more under construction and five in the planning stage. It has built two new field houses, remodeled 28 old buildings from top to bottom. The main door of each renovated school has been painted red--"a sign to the public," says Jacqueline Leonhard, "that the school is safe."

As far as Mrs. Leonhard is concerned, the building program is only the beginning. Once the city has a proper plant, she thinks, it can begin to concentrate on remodeling the curriculum. In that job, the board can expect full cooperation from its able new superintendent, James Redmond; it was one of the results of Mrs. Four-to-One's crusade that he was hired.

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