In 1929, Elsie Ripley Clapp accepted a position as principal of the Ballard Memorial School, a public school in the rolling meadowland of Jefferson County, Kentucky, along the Ohio River just north of Louisville. A well-born Brooklynite and graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University, Clapp was a leader in the Progressive Education Association, with teaching and administrative experience in avant-garde private schools. She was also a former teaching assistant and a lifelong disciple of John Dewey, whose pedagogical theory she would apply in a rural area.
The Ballard Memorial School, Clapp's first community school experiment, served an amalgam of poor rural children and youngsters from prosperous farm families. Clapp and the progressive educators she recruited to Jefferson County developed an adventurous curriculum steeped in community resources that recalled Dewey's Chicago Laboratory School in its emphasis on experiential learning and the spiraling of a general theme from lower to upper grades. Clapp's five years at Ballard Memorial proved to be an experimental staging ground for her leadership of a school and community revitalization project in Arthurdale, West Virginia, a New Deal-sponsored “subsistence homestead” on a high plateau in Preston County, southeast of Morgantown, the center of the Monongahela Valley coal industry.
Sam F. Stack's The Arthurdale Community School recounts the history of the short-lived, Dewey-inspired community school that Elsie Clapp headed under federal auspices at Arthurdale from 1934 to 1936. In this first book-length treatment of the subject, the author describes the organization and activities of the multifaceted community school, highlights the school's apparent successes and its constraints as a rural beacon of progressive education, and details its demise as a community-centered school after Clapp withdrew from the project. Stack argues forcefully that the progressive Arthurdale School and its program of community services formed a catalytic hub for community social and economic development. For readers of Stack's previous work, this argument will come as no surprise. The Arthurdale Community School is essentially an expanded version of a chapter in Stack's Elsie Ripley Clapp (1879–1965): Her Life and the Community School (2004). The author's sources include Clapp's publications and private papers, Eleanor Roosevelt's papers, Dewey's published works and private correspondence, documents in federal and state archives, and myriad secondary sources.
As Stack recounts, the Arthurdale homestead was created out of Section 208 of Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which authorized federal funds to relocate unemployed workers and their families from beleaguered industrial centers to isolated rural homesteads where they would grow their own food on a subsistence basis and earn income by working in the small factories the planners hoped to attract to the homesteads. The first and most publicized of the rural rehabilitation projects, Arthurdale was created to transform out-of-work coal miners and families in Scotts Run, a gone-bust bituminous coalfield in neighboring Monongahela County, into subsistence farmers and productive workers in small-scale industries. One observer memorably called it, “the damndest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America” (p. 34). Appalled by the conditions she observed there, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt used her influence in Washington to have the first of the federal subsistence homesteads built for the people of Scotts Run. Mrs. Roosevelt hired Clapp as “principal of the Arthurdale School and director of community affairs” (p. 56).
Clapp's contributions to the development of the community school idea were twofold. First, she defined the contours of what she called a “socially functioning school” in two books she published on Ballard Memorial and Arthurdale—Community Schools in Action (1939) and The Use of Resources in Education (1952), volumes replete with curricular details on the use of community resources, for which Dewey contributed the forewords. Second, she explicitly translated Dewey's pedagogical theory, created at the University of Chicago's Laboratory Schools, in the context of rural America. At Arthurdale, Clapp had the luxury of being able to select her own teachers, including six progressive stalwarts from Ballard Memorial.
Serving more than three hundred students by 1936, the well-appointed school complex included a nursery school, an elementary school, a high school (with adjoining greenhouse), a multipurpose recreational building for school and community use, an administrative building, and space for an adult education component. Rounding out the community school—and essential to Clapp's conception of a community school—was a school-based health clinic staffed by a resident physician and nurse that provided essential primary and pre- and postnatal care for the homesteader families.
Stack shows that, unlike Ballard Memorial, the community school curriculum revolved around occupations and concerns related to actually developing the Arthurdale community, with “community life being defined as self-identity, a sense of place, and a sense of contribution” (p. 63). During the two years Clapp guided the project, the building construction, gardening, well digging, and other homestead occupations were ongoing community activities integrated with the younger children's studies, which included reading, history, science, and mathematics. The high school offered vocational training as well as applied economics, field-based science studies, mathematics, history, art, and literature. Yet, for reasons explained in the book, the school's physical plant and progressive education program were expensive and too dependent on federal and private philanthropy to be sustainable. Stack's most effective writing—and his book's most original contribution—is his description of the sad decline of the community school as it transitioned from Clapp's direction and federal/private sponsorship to the status of an ordinary school operated by West Virginia school authorities, by which point it was neither community-centered nor progressive. He also accounts for the failure of the Arthurdale homestead to survive the Second World War under federal auspices.
Stack acknowledges the overall project's conspicuous flaws, which he attributes to risk-averse New Deal planners who were anxious to avoid political controversy. The most serious shortcomings were the exclusion of African Americans from the homestead in deference to West Virginia's Jim Crow statutes and mores; the federal bureaucracy's ham-fisted, red tape-laden management of the homestead; and the absence of democracy in community school affairs. Stack is probably right not to chastise Clapp for acting undemocratically in this politicized context, but he should have taken her to task for not forthrightly acknowledging in her post-Arthurdale books the contradictions between her and Dewey's democratic theory and the paternalistic constraints that bound her actions.
There are some other problems with The Arthurdale Community School. Beyond some sweeping generalizations, Stack has nothing specific to say about other Depression-era community school experiments, such as the strikingly similar community school at Nambé, New Mexico (1937–1942). Also, while the author aptly observes the strong hold Dewey's theory held on Clapp, he takes no account of Dewey's seminal 1902 Chicago essay “The School as Social Centre.” Dewey envisioned urban schools functioning as social settlements in the sense that they would offer evening educational, social, and recreational programs—and as their primary democratic purpose, bring together people of diverse racial, ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds for “real communion with each other.” Yet, Dewey failed to consider the role that schools might play as community problem-solving institutions—as community schools would do in Clapp's conception.
For all her flaws, Elsie Clapp rightly identified the logical entailments of Dewey's Chicago theory and melded these with the theory of democratic community Dewey famously propounded in The Public and Its Problems (1927). As The Arthurdale Community School suggests, Clapp's legacy is an enduring definition of the core elements of a fully functioning community school.
