What Imagination Can Do

Four years ago, no public school in Cleveland offered hot lunches to its students. Now all secondary schools do, and last month the city became the first in the nation to offer free breakfasts, to 14,000 children in elementary schools. The milk-and-cereal program--which has dramatically cut down on absenteeism--is the brainchild of Superintendent Paul Warren Briggs, 55, who is steadily changing an ailing public-school system into a healthy one.

For nearly half a century, the Cleveland schools suffered from a combination of civic complacency, the steady flight of middle-class whites to the suburbs, and the limiting effects of a debt-free, pay-as-you-go school budget policy. By 1964, the city was spending only $450 per student annually on education, compared with $850 in nearby Shaker Heights. As a result, half of Cleveland's students were in schools more than 50 years old. Only two high schools offered vocational training--and less than a third of all graduates were able to find jobs. None of the city's 135 elementary schools even had a library. After a white minister protesting de facto segregation in schools was accidentally crushed to death by a bulldozer (TIME, April 17, 1964), civil rights leaders organized a citywide student boycott.

Russian in Parma. At that low point, the board of education offered the job of superintendent to Paul Briggs. Son of a small-town baker, he had worked his way through Western Michigan University as a part-time pastry chef, taught in high schools for nine years before being named principal and then superintendent of the Bay City, Mich., schools. In 1957, Briggs was named superintendent of schools in Parma, Ohio, where he introduced one of the country's first closed-circuit educational TV networks and created a Russian language program that, he was able to boast, had more teachers than any university Russian department in the state.

Before taking the $40,000 Cleveland post, Briggs demanded the abolition of an outdated troika system, in which three autonomous administrators reported separately to the school board on curriculum, finance and architecture. In a series of conferences with business leaders, he also insisted on assurances of community support, since "I cannot do it alone." Once installed in office, Briggs undertook a massive publicity campaign to bring home to Clevelanders just how bad the schools were. He even walked around town displaying photographic blowups of the stinking, 19th century toilets--open sewage troughs with a waste receptacle at one end--still used by 15,000 students. By 1966, Briggs's efforts had paid off in the form of a 20% increase in school taxes and a $66 million bond issue.

Briggs has used school funds with imagination and care. More than $30 million in school construction is under way, and teacher salaries have been raised 20%. In addition, 3,000 volunteers now ease the load by aiding teachers in libraries and homemaking classes, escorting students on business, museum and factory tours. Every elementary school has its own library, and all 16 high schools now offer vocational training. Next fall Briggs will inaugurate a new dropout training center in a four-story brick warehouse donated by General Electric. "Our schools must have two exits," says Briggs, "one into higher education and the other into employment"--and 93% of last June's high school graduates who did not go on to college have now found jobs.

Assumption Refuted. Integration remains Cleveland's basic education problem: more than half of the city's 153,000 students are Negro, and 90% of them attend schools that are four-fifths black. Along with a growing number of other urban educators, Briggs does not believe that bussing inner-city youths to predominantly white schools is the answer. "If we are concerned with developing neighborhood schools and a school-home partnership," he says, "we cannot start by sending kids far from home." Instead, his concern is to improve existing schools regardless of their racial mix. "People say that you cannot have quality in all-Negro schools," he says. "I refute that assumption." So does the existence of Cleveland's brand-new Adlai Stevenson Elementary School in the mostly Negro Harvard-Lee district, which ranks in the top 10% in the city. Civil rights leaders back Briggs's program--especially since he has managed, without fuss or fanfare, to step up integration of the system's teaching and administrative staff.

What makes Briggs so successful is an ability to assign priorities and a shrewd sense of what is politically possible. "I avoid head-on collisions," he says, preferring to cajole rather than bulldoze people into seeing things his way. Says one board-of-education member who initially fought Briggs's appointment: "I didn't know what a superintendent was supposed to do until I saw him in action." Briggs's reputation for getting things done has spread, and he has had a number of offers from other cities. For the time being, he intends to stay in Cleveland, partly out of fear that "if I go now, the old systerm will return," partly because he likes the job. ''While all of my colleagues across the country are moaning and groaning," he says, "I have never had more fun in my life."

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