Hope in the Slums

A Negro boy carries home his school books, but does not get to study them because his neurotic father heaves the lot out the window. A Negro girl, whose father has deserted the family, is free to leave for school only after she washes and feeds eight younger brothers and sisters, and so she is usually late. A Puerto Rican boy, who came to the U.S. in 1956 and speaks only Spanish at home, shyly refused to try his halting English in school, scored a predictable 74 on an IQ test given in the new language.

For many such teen-agers in the bleak reaches of upper Manhattan's slums, high school is a waste of time-and public money. More often than not they drop out before graduation to take dead-end jobs, in a few years send to school another generation of hopeless pupils. But to some 450 youngsters at Manhattan's George Washington High School and Junior High School 43, an experimental teaching and guidance program offers a fair chance to complete high school, and for the brightest, a hope of going on to college. This week, after more than two years' trial, the New York City board of education pronounced the experiment a success, planned to ask for $500,000 to extend the program to some 30 lower-income-area schools.

Words & Works. Sponsored by the city, the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, the project is no quick educational cureall. The hope is to try to balance the dragging weight of the children's hard-luck homes with a long-range program of understanding help at school. Project classes are small (range: ten to 28); teachers are carefully briefed on each child's background; the children are taken on after-hours class trips, get repeated personal counseling. At George Washington, stocky, balding Counselor David Schulman, who grew up in Brooklyn, sees individual students as often as three times a week. Sometimes they merely want to hear a friendly word; sometimes they need real help. Counselor Schulman will ask for a social worker to cope with an alcoholic father, arrange an appointment with the project psychologist for children whose lives are impossibly tangled, or give out small sums from project funds to help buy food. One measure of his success: not one of the project's teen-agers has been in real trouble; normally 10% would have become chronic troublemakers by now.

The project's ultimate goal is to find college candidates among once-hopeless students. It is a long, uphill fight. Of 148 students in the experiment's first class at Junior High School 43, only 38 were able to pass all their courses after they went on to George Washington in 1957. Without the experiment's hand-tailored education, perhaps five could have expected to pass.

No Illusions. At George Washington last week, the young Negro boy whose father hates books was working successfully in his studies, and the Puerto Rican lad who refused to talk is talking; he told Counselor Schulman that he wanted to be a newspaper reporter, agreed that he could never succeed unless he could ask questions in English. No one has any illusions about how many college-quality scholars are likely to come from the experiment's first group. The girl with the eight brothers and sisters may never be a pediatrician, as she hopes, but because of the experiment she may be able to enter nurses' training.

The pressing need, as George Washington Principal Henry T. Hillson and others interested in the experiment see it, is to begin special programs for children at the very start of their education. If the school board gets the $500,000 it wants from the city, and perhaps another $500,000 from foundations, guidance programs will be set up beginning in elementary school and continuing right on to high school graduation day.

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