The Connecticut Yankee

At Manchester (Conn.) High School, a student needs a B or better in all subjects to make the honor roll, and bright, spunky Charlene Southergill, 17, seemed a shoo-in. In the last quarter of her junior year this spring, she got a B in algebra, B in college-level biology, B in college-level English, and A in college-level American history. Was this enough to land her on the honor roll? Not at all: Charlene got a C in archery.

After getting her report card, Charlene barricaded herself in the family bomb shelter that her housepainter father recently built off the cellar. Last week she emerged with a bomb for the school board --a scathing letter of protest, which the Manchester Evening Herald promptly published. Her complaint: that "in the jet age, the space age, the atomic age and the age of pushbutton warfare,'' Manchester High makes no distinction between brains and brawn. "Inexcusable stupidity," wrote she. "I fully expect upon returning to M.H.S. to be faced with a course in stone axes and spears, in which no doubt I will be given another C." Charlene is not unathletic: last year she won a women's golf tournament, and her prowess at girls' softball kept her on the honor roll for two quarters this year.

But in the last quarter, archery bored her, and in another she played poor tennis: "Tennis! Oh, forty-love! Well, for your information, they are not batting tennis balls at Cape Canaveral." To Charlene, the school's insistence that physical and mental education count equally seemed an echo of the old notion ("back in the days of outdoor privies") that Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton. "Live in our world of 1960," she urged as she cited such "notoriously poor athletes" as Edison and Einstein. "This might come as a great shock to you, but we are not going to beat the Communist threat with bows and arrows."

Charlene's call to "get back on our planet" and change the honor-roll system did not go unheeded. Other Connecticut newspapers wrote praising editorials; dozens of strangers phoned to congratulate her. One sympathetic Manchester school board member estimated that 200 other bright youngsters missed the honor roll at Manchester High this year for the same reason Charlene did: low physical education grades. "This is a symptom of what's wrong with our school system," said the board member. "We're not rewarding academic achievement. We're rewarding the best 'wellrounded' samplers." But other board members seemed content to leave the problem to a committee, which took it up several months ago after one parent complained. The committee has not been heard from since.

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