Sunday, April 10, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

'YOUNG LAS VEGAS, 1905-1931: BEFORE THE FUTURE FOUND US': Chapter Seven

Burgeoning enrollment, shortage of money always problems for Las Vegas schools

All Special Collection photos are the property of University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries and cannot be reproduced without permission. The 1905-1906 school term was taught by Mrs. Schultz in the back row, at left. Pictured are pupils in fifth through eighth grades. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS As part of school festivities on George Washington's birthday, Las Vegas children perform a dance on plank flooring installed outdoors. The photo is undated. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS This wooden school building served Las Vegas from 1905 to 1910, when it burned down. The belfry was an addition to the original stucture. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Las Vegas School students Alice Lake Rockwell and Walter Manuel won a state award in 1908, possibly in public speaking, with the help of their teacher Elsie Bartlett. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Contemporary public education in Las Vegas suffers from tight money, a classroom shortage and overabundance of pupils. This pattern dates back to the earliest days of the community.

After Las Vegas was launched in spring 1905, a tent served as a classroom for about 20 children. But the tent soon got commandeered for use as a courtroom.

In late spring and summer, residents met and chose a three-person school board to plan for the future. But the school fund was low, containing only the "grand sum of $25.10," Las Vegas historian Frank Wright wrote. The Salt Lake Hotel, a four-room building two blocks from the intended school site, came up for sale. Townspeople bought it and spent a total of $700 to move and renovate it.

School opened late, on Oct. 2. Initial enrollment was between 50 and 60 students, with two teachers. By mid-October the count had already ballooned to 81, with no proportional increase in the number of teachers, according to a 1978 newspaper history article by Elizabeth Harrington.

Despite the bargain price for a schoolhouse, the school treasury was again empty by spring. School income came largely from public subscription. No city government yet existed to levy taxes, and state contributions to local education were minimal from 1907 to 1955, according to Wright.

So Las Vegas ended its first school year abruptly, on March 30, 1906. The school closed, one newspaper wrote, "for lack of funds, as the trustees deemed it wiser to close two months early than to incur additional indebtedness." But, "the fall term will open with good teachers and a replenished treasury," it concluded.

Each year, the student body continued to grow. Just two years later, the town had to build another small schoolhouse alongside the first, and hire a third teacher.

By 1910, the town was preparing to build a two-story, 14-classroom school to house both elementary grades and high school. The new building would have a heating system, a vast improvement over the pot-bellied stoves in the original two buildings.

The railroad's Las Vegas Land and Water Co. donated a two-block parcel of land for the project, bounded by Fourth and Fifth streets, and by Bridger and Clark streets.

To celebrate July 4, 1910, Las Vegans laid a cornerstone for the new school. During the ceremony they also placed students' names and two American flags in the ground. "One of them (had) 36 stars because Nevada was the 36th state to enter the Union. The other was a standard flag, with 46 stars for the 46-state union of 1910," according to a 1955 special newspaper edition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Las Vegas' founding.

But disaster struck in autumn. Before the new building was complete, the two existing school buildings burned down.

"For the rest of that year and the following year, the children went to school in part of the Methodist Church and part of an old rooming house," Florence Squires Boyer recalled in her oral history.

The school construction hit some snags. The completed building stood vacant for several months while the contractor and the school board's inspector argued. It was "not occupied until the fall of 1911 when the contractors built concrete steps outside the building to the second story. It was built first with wooden stairways inside, making the second floor a death trap in case of fire," a Las Vegas newspaper history piece explained in 1980.

The new, improved facility drew in more families who lived in outlying areas. Before the 1911 school year started, people met to make living arrangements for high school students coming in from the remote areas. "Already several (Las Vegas families) have offered to take boys and girls to work for their room and board," a news report noted.

In later years, other outlying families let their youngsters drive cars to grade school. During the mid-1920s, Alma Chavez Sprague's older brother drove the family vehicle into town from Arden. "My brother was driving at age 11," the 83-year-old Las Vegan said in 2004.

Students and teachers used the school's controversial outdoors stairs to advantage. Its raised landing served as a stage for special events. "That's where we put on plays, May Day," said Amelia Mikulich Smith, who was born in Las Vegas in 1923. Most programs to which parents were invited took place in the daytime on weekends. "We didn't have the wiring set up" for outdoor night lighting, she recalled in 2004.

In 1914, the senior class numbered six.

In 1918, Las Vegans built and opened a separate building -- with 17 classrooms, gym and auditorium -- to house the high school exclusively.

Every year brought innovation. In 1921, high school students in a business program set up their own bank. Manual arts classes were added in a separate building around the same time. Donna Hanley Andress in 2004 remembered learning to swim in physical education classes that were off campus in the early 1930s. "They marched us from (school) to the Mermaid," a privately owned swimming pool at Fifth and Fremont streets.

But the physical plant of Las Vegas schools was primitive by today's standards. "In that old school over there, all they had was fans," Bob Underhill said in 2004. "They'd just open all the windows and put all the fans on one side of the class, blowing over the students and out the windows." Underhill was born in Las Vegas in 1926.

The school's wooden floors were maintained with oil and sawdust to keep dust down. It created an obvious fire hazard, according to Las Vegan Emmett Smith, born in 1924.

Student discipline policies reflected the era's values. Obedience and respect of elders took priority over student rights and self-expression.

"She put tape across my mouth one time. It didn't hurt but it was embarrassing." That was how one of Chavez Sprague's elementary teachers handled the girl's incessant chatter during class.

A fellow student once shot Shirley Ferron Swanson with a slingshot, during class, "right in the back of the neck. Of course it hurt like heck." It was seventh or eighth grade, according to Ferron Swanson, who was born in 1919, the daughter of pharmacist William Ferron, the third mayor of Las Vegas. The principal summoned her and the slingshot shooter "down to the school basement where the furnace was. He took this ruler and just beat the heck out of that kid," Ferron said in 2004.

When it came to elementary schools, Southern Nevada had numerous small districts. One of these smaller districts lay in Paradise Valley, the southeastern part of the Las Vegas Valley. Kiyo Tomiyasu, who was living on the East Coast in 2004, spent his childhood on a family farm in Paradise Valley. Born in 1919, he went to first through sixth grades at a one-room school for several farm families, near the intersection of present-day Warm Springs and Paradise roads. His teacher was "Miss Lillian Gentry, a Mormon, our first teacher, born and raised in Caliente," Tomiyasu wrote in 2004.

"It is hard to believe now, but she taught six grade levels, all subjects, two students per grade. ... She spent perhaps 15 minutes per class per subject, maybe three times per week for each subject per class. I don't know how she did all this. All students heard the lessons being taught to other grades."

Gentry not only was a competent teacher, but also had an intriguing back story. As a child in Caliente, she had lost her legs in an accident on a railroad track. Yet Gentry drove a car and could ride a horse. Tomiyasu decided to test the story. "So one day I was close enough to her, and I knocked on one leg -- and it sounded like wood." He never got a chance to knock on the other one.

A big shot in the arm for public education came in 1921 when educator Maude Frazier (1881-1963) came to Las Vegas. Based in the city, she was deputy superintendent of public instruction for Nevada's four southern counties. The area comprised 40,000 square miles and 63 assorted school districts. She logged thousands of miles, driving alone on dirt roads, to supervise her charges in other communities.

Frazier had traveled to Nevada in 1906 from Wisconsin, to take a job as a teaching principal in northern Nevada. She left the Midwest inspired by engineering students at her Wisconsin boarding house who had already been out West.

"It seemed to me that the talk invariably turned to the West and the wonderful opportunities to be found there," she wrote in a memoir. "They told of Jim Butler hunting his burros, only to find both the animals and silver, consequently starting the silver camp of Tonopah. In this fabulous land, a man who didn't have a second pair of socks one day might be a millionaire the next. Why would a venturesome young woman find it in her heart to remain in a drab (Wisconsin) town and let all this excitement pass her by?"

After various teaching jobs in other parts of Nevada, Frazier in 1927 took the job of superintendent of the Las Vegas Union School District. That meant she headed the elementary and high school districts. She also served as high school principal. By then, the Union District was using four buildings on South Fourth Street, and a fifth on the West Side, a section of town west of the railroad tracks.

She deplored the condition of the 10-year-old high school. "The thought of what might happen in that building if a fire started gave me more wrinkles and gray hair than all the rest of the job," she once said. (The building did burn down in 1934.)

Frazier developed plans for a large, new high school on the edge of town at Seventh and Bridger streets and rallied voters to pass a $350,000 bond issue in 1928 to build it. Critics assailed the remote location and scoffed at her enrollment projections of 500. "The Las Vegas school district has never failed to show an annual increase in enrollment, and it never will," she tartly responded.

Time proved Frazier correct. The building opened in September 1930 and was quickly filled. In 2004 the building was still in use, as a magnet high school focusing on performing arts and diplomacy. Its architecture also has earned it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stella Champo Iaconis, a student under Frazier, told an oral historian in 1981 that the principal always "meant business. And I guess that's why they called her `old crab' and everything else." Yet when Champo Iaconis dropped out of high school in 1927 because of her mother's suicide, Frazier paid a personal visit to invite her to return to school. "She said, `Stella, I'd like to see you get your education, your diploma.' " Champo Iaconis (1910-1998) could not be coaxed back, but was touched by Frazier's concern.

Next Sunday in Living: In Sickness and Health

The book and series are a joint project of the Review-Journal and its sister book publishing company, Stephens Press, in recognition of Las Vegas' centennial year. Additional information, and many more pictures about everyday life before legal gambling and Hoover Dam changed Las Vegas forever, will be included in the book. Advance copies of the hardbound book may be reserved at $24.95, a $5 discount from the cover price, at www.stephenspress.com.