(Feb. 18, 2016) Today, the Worcester County system has 14 public schools serving some 7,700 students and operating on an annual budget of nearly $100 million.
Compare that to conditions during the middle of the last century, when, for instance, Wi-Fi was decades off, and giving a book to a high school freshman would have sounded revolutionary – to say nothing of a laptop computer.
There was a time, between the end of World War II and the beginning of integration, when teachers in the United States were forced to get by on far less. That was especially true here, a primarily rural county on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Josephine Clark Anderson, 95, grew up in Whaleyville and attended the Flower Street School in Berlin, currently the site of the Multipurpose Building. In 1939, she enrolled in the Maryland Normal and Industrial School at Bowie, which today is known as Bowie State University.
“I was in the first class that had a degree, in 1941. There was 14 of us,” she said. “It’s like a city there now.”
After Bowie, she became a teacher-principal in Stockton, Maryland, instructing dozens of students in grades 1-7 simultaneously, tucked inside a small classroom with limited resources. Her first monthly paycheck was $65.
She worked for the federal government for several years during the war, then moved back home to Germantown, where she taught grades 4-6, before moving on to Flower Street School. Far from a brick-and-mortar building, the school was made up of five small, portable schoolrooms. At times, Anderson said, there were 40-50 students in a single class, with two classes operating at once.
“I still wonder how in the world did we teach all the subjects to every grade during that short period during the day,” she said. “I’m still puzzled about that. After a while, I guess you get the knack of it and you just do it.”
In 1970, when Flower Street students were integrated into other schools, all the students had to help pack up the books and school supplies from the old portables. Anderson assumed those, too, would be integrated into the new schools.
“The day that man came to pick up the boxes, I said, ‘What school will these books go to?’ He says, ‘to the dump.’ My first year at the Berlin Middle School, we needed those books and we didn’t even have them,” she said. “All those supplies they had gathered from the black schools – they carried them to the dump.”
Leola Armstrong Smack, 76, followed a similar path, attending Flower Street School as a child, and then earning a degree at Bowie, which, by then was called the Maryland State Teacher’s College. In 1956, she returned to Berlin to teach first grade at Flower Street.
“My first grade students had no Head Start, no kindergarten, no preschool experience – I got them, right from mom and dad,” she said. “I taught them everything. They didn’t leave my room until they went home. I was their mother, their teacher, their music teacher, their phys. ed. teacher – I was their everything.”
Smack had almost 40 students in her class during that first year. She remembers making $1,200 a year, and spending a considerable amount of that on school supplies for her students.
“The white teachers got more than the black teachers,” she said, adding that the majority of books and furniture were “hand-me-downs” from the white schools.
“We started each day with a prayer,” she said. “Then, after the morning session, we cleared our desk and then we had our grace for lunch, and then back to work in the same classroom. They stayed with me for everything.”
She taught a first and second grade “combination class” for five years, then taught third grade for another five years.
In 1967, she was called into the superintendent’s office and told her next assignment would be as a fourth-grade teacher at Buckingham Elementary.
“I told the superintendent, ‘I’m fine where I am, so I’ll just stay there.’ He said, ‘if you want to continue to teach, you will go to Buckingham.’ So off I went, that September, the only black teacher at that school,” she said.
Smack had two black students in that class, allowed into the school thanks to the federally enacted “Freedom of Choice” plan. She said she was nervous at first – bringing her husband with her as a safety net to an early PTA meeting – but that her integrated students never presented any real problems.
“To the students, I was their teacher. They didn’t see any color,” she said. “And they treated me royally. I didn’t have any trouble at all.”
Like the teachers, Smack said many administrators did not have a say in school choice, and several were forced into lower positions. That included longtime Flower Street supervisor Elaine Spry, who was named vice principal at Berlin Middle School.
“The person they made principal was Tom Dorman, who was out of one of the [white] schools. Tom has told me himself he knew nothing about running a school back then, and that Ms. Spry was the one who helped him get the foundation laid out. She did most of the work.”
Juanita Harrell White, 81, was born in North Carolina and moved to the Eastern Shore in 1960, when she found work as a teacher at Flower Street, making $280 a month. Her rent, living with a family in Germantown, was $9 a week.
She was hired in October, replacing another teacher who had just lost her job.
“There was a teacher who started showing, and back in those days if you were pregnant, you weren’t supposed to teach,” she said. “When they found out that she was pregnant, she had to resign.”
Black teachers were required to take at least eight months of unpaid maternity leave after their children were born. Unwed mothers were simply let go, as well as any male teachers who contributed to a pregnancy conceived outside of marriage.
Along with the unfamiliar working conditions, White said the portable buildings themselves astonished her when she first arrived.
“Coming from North Carolina, from a much larger school, I never experienced nothing like that. It was strange-looking to me when I went into those units,” she said. “There was no library, no cafeteria.”
She also had to share 16 math textbooks with the other teacher in her unit, despite having upwards of 30 students in each class.
Then, in 1965, White herself was forced to go on maternity leave. She later found out her supervisor planned to let her go outright.
“The black supervisor came in my classroom and gave me one of the worst write-ups you could ever have,” she said. “It was heartbreaking, because I just had a baby. I had bills. You can’t imagine how that affected me. But, I went on.”
She found part-time work in Somerset County, and in the Indian River school district, in Delaware. A year later, her substitute work led to a full-time positon there.
“I was the first black person hired [in the Indian River district] in 1966,” she said. “They let all black teachers go with the exception of two, and I was the second one. I had to take [work] where I could get it to get my foot in the door.”
It might not have been what she was initially looking for, but White found herself thriving there, teaching language arts to fifth and sixth graders.
“I was treated fine. I really enjoyed it,” she said. “When one door closes another one opens, and it was an excellent door. I stayed there for 33 years.”
White retired in 1980. Anderson retired in 1983, after teaching for 38 years. Smack retired in 1992, after 35 years, although she continued to substitute, offer in-home tutoring and leading an afterschool program at her church.
Despite all the hardships during the years before integration, she looks back on those days with pride – and fondness.
“It was very rewarding,” Smack said. “Even with the limited resources that we had, we turned out teachers, we turned out lawyers, we turned out nurses, secretaries, ministers, doctors and judges.
“The reason we were successful is because of the parent involvement, the dedicated teachers and the obedient students,” she continued. “They were pillars of strength, and they were successful because we had to do the very best for them.”
Anderson said it was not in spite of, but precisely because of those adverse conditions that so many black teachers in Berlin became so adept at their jobs – and so many of their students went on to earn advance degrees and become successful in their own careers.
“If you could teach in Worcester County as a black teacher, you could teach anywhere in the world,” she said. “It was the same thing in Wicomico County, and it was the same thing in Dorchester County. Any of those black teachers during any of those years – if they went anywhere else to teach, they had no problems.”
Smack went so far as to suggest the stringent guidelines actually ended up benefiting the students.
“The principals were very strict on the black teachers, in the black schools, during segregation. But I think that was because they wanted the best for our children, and they demanded us, as teachers, to give our best,” she said. “The accomplishments and the success of our students all seem worthwhile. They have really, really accomplished wonderful things.”
Despite all the complications, all three women dearly loved their jobs, and all three said they operated under the same motto: “Take the child as God has made him or her, the last teacher left … Take them and go on from there.”
All three women said they still think about their former students every day. Because each of them taught for more than three decades, it’s almost impossible not to run into someone who, in a former life, was a little boy, or a little girl, learning about reading, writing and arithmetic inside a small, portable classroom on Flower Street.
“My grandchildren say to me, ‘Grandma you know everybody.’ From Willards to Ocean City, from Newark to Selbyville – everywhere I go I see somebody I used to teach. Wherever I go, it’s always somebody that knows me,” Anderson said.
Compare that to conditions during the middle of the last century, when, for instance, Wi-Fi was decades off, and giving a book to a high school freshman would have sounded revolutionary – to say nothing of a laptop computer.
There was a time, between the end of World War II and the beginning of integration, when teachers in the United States were forced to get by on far less. That was especially true here, a primarily rural county on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Josephine Clark Anderson, 95, grew up in Whaleyville and attended the Flower Street School in Berlin, currently the site of the Multipurpose Building. In 1939, she enrolled in the Maryland Normal and Industrial School at Bowie, which today is known as Bowie State University.
“I was in the first class that had a degree, in 1941. There was 14 of us,” she said. “It’s like a city there now.”
After Bowie, she became a teacher-principal in Stockton, Maryland, instructing dozens of students in grades 1-7 simultaneously, tucked inside a small classroom with limited resources. Her first monthly paycheck was $65.
She worked for the federal government for several years during the war, then moved back home to Germantown, where she taught grades 4-6, before moving on to Flower Street School. Far from a brick-and-mortar building, the school was made up of five small, portable schoolrooms. At times, Anderson said, there were 40-50 students in a single class, with two classes operating at once.
“I still wonder how in the world did we teach all the subjects to every grade during that short period during the day,” she said. “I’m still puzzled about that. After a while, I guess you get the knack of it and you just do it.”
In 1970, when Flower Street students were integrated into other schools, all the students had to help pack up the books and school supplies from the old portables. Anderson assumed those, too, would be integrated into the new schools.
“The day that man came to pick up the boxes, I said, ‘What school will these books go to?’ He says, ‘to the dump.’ My first year at the Berlin Middle School, we needed those books and we didn’t even have them,” she said. “All those supplies they had gathered from the black schools – they carried them to the dump.”
Leola Armstrong Smack, 76, followed a similar path, attending Flower Street School as a child, and then earning a degree at Bowie, which, by then was called the Maryland State Teacher’s College. In 1956, she returned to Berlin to teach first grade at Flower Street.
“My first grade students had no Head Start, no kindergarten, no preschool experience – I got them, right from mom and dad,” she said. “I taught them everything. They didn’t leave my room until they went home. I was their mother, their teacher, their music teacher, their phys. ed. teacher – I was their everything.”
Smack had almost 40 students in her class during that first year. She remembers making $1,200 a year, and spending a considerable amount of that on school supplies for her students.
“The white teachers got more than the black teachers,” she said, adding that the majority of books and furniture were “hand-me-downs” from the white schools.
“We started each day with a prayer,” she said. “Then, after the morning session, we cleared our desk and then we had our grace for lunch, and then back to work in the same classroom. They stayed with me for everything.”
She taught a first and second grade “combination class” for five years, then taught third grade for another five years.
In 1967, she was called into the superintendent’s office and told her next assignment would be as a fourth-grade teacher at Buckingham Elementary.
“I told the superintendent, ‘I’m fine where I am, so I’ll just stay there.’ He said, ‘if you want to continue to teach, you will go to Buckingham.’ So off I went, that September, the only black teacher at that school,” she said.
Smack had two black students in that class, allowed into the school thanks to the federally enacted “Freedom of Choice” plan. She said she was nervous at first – bringing her husband with her as a safety net to an early PTA meeting – but that her integrated students never presented any real problems.
“To the students, I was their teacher. They didn’t see any color,” she said. “And they treated me royally. I didn’t have any trouble at all.”
Like the teachers, Smack said many administrators did not have a say in school choice, and several were forced into lower positions. That included longtime Flower Street supervisor Elaine Spry, who was named vice principal at Berlin Middle School.
“The person they made principal was Tom Dorman, who was out of one of the [white] schools. Tom has told me himself he knew nothing about running a school back then, and that Ms. Spry was the one who helped him get the foundation laid out. She did most of the work.”
Juanita Harrell White, 81, was born in North Carolina and moved to the Eastern Shore in 1960, when she found work as a teacher at Flower Street, making $280 a month. Her rent, living with a family in Germantown, was $9 a week.
She was hired in October, replacing another teacher who had just lost her job.
“There was a teacher who started showing, and back in those days if you were pregnant, you weren’t supposed to teach,” she said. “When they found out that she was pregnant, she had to resign.”
Black teachers were required to take at least eight months of unpaid maternity leave after their children were born. Unwed mothers were simply let go, as well as any male teachers who contributed to a pregnancy conceived outside of marriage.
Along with the unfamiliar working conditions, White said the portable buildings themselves astonished her when she first arrived.
“Coming from North Carolina, from a much larger school, I never experienced nothing like that. It was strange-looking to me when I went into those units,” she said. “There was no library, no cafeteria.”
She also had to share 16 math textbooks with the other teacher in her unit, despite having upwards of 30 students in each class.
Then, in 1965, White herself was forced to go on maternity leave. She later found out her supervisor planned to let her go outright.
“The black supervisor came in my classroom and gave me one of the worst write-ups you could ever have,” she said. “It was heartbreaking, because I just had a baby. I had bills. You can’t imagine how that affected me. But, I went on.”
She found part-time work in Somerset County, and in the Indian River school district, in Delaware. A year later, her substitute work led to a full-time positon there.
“I was the first black person hired [in the Indian River district] in 1966,” she said. “They let all black teachers go with the exception of two, and I was the second one. I had to take [work] where I could get it to get my foot in the door.”
It might not have been what she was initially looking for, but White found herself thriving there, teaching language arts to fifth and sixth graders.
“I was treated fine. I really enjoyed it,” she said. “When one door closes another one opens, and it was an excellent door. I stayed there for 33 years.”
White retired in 1980. Anderson retired in 1983, after teaching for 38 years. Smack retired in 1992, after 35 years, although she continued to substitute, offer in-home tutoring and leading an afterschool program at her church.
Despite all the hardships during the years before integration, she looks back on those days with pride – and fondness.
“It was very rewarding,” Smack said. “Even with the limited resources that we had, we turned out teachers, we turned out lawyers, we turned out nurses, secretaries, ministers, doctors and judges.
“The reason we were successful is because of the parent involvement, the dedicated teachers and the obedient students,” she continued. “They were pillars of strength, and they were successful because we had to do the very best for them.”
Anderson said it was not in spite of, but precisely because of those adverse conditions that so many black teachers in Berlin became so adept at their jobs – and so many of their students went on to earn advance degrees and become successful in their own careers.
“If you could teach in Worcester County as a black teacher, you could teach anywhere in the world,” she said. “It was the same thing in Wicomico County, and it was the same thing in Dorchester County. Any of those black teachers during any of those years – if they went anywhere else to teach, they had no problems.”
Smack went so far as to suggest the stringent guidelines actually ended up benefiting the students.
“The principals were very strict on the black teachers, in the black schools, during segregation. But I think that was because they wanted the best for our children, and they demanded us, as teachers, to give our best,” she said. “The accomplishments and the success of our students all seem worthwhile. They have really, really accomplished wonderful things.”
Despite all the complications, all three women dearly loved their jobs, and all three said they operated under the same motto: “Take the child as God has made him or her, the last teacher left … Take them and go on from there.”
All three women said they still think about their former students every day. Because each of them taught for more than three decades, it’s almost impossible not to run into someone who, in a former life, was a little boy, or a little girl, learning about reading, writing and arithmetic inside a small, portable classroom on Flower Street.
“My grandchildren say to me, ‘Grandma you know everybody.’ From Willards to Ocean City, from Newark to Selbyville – everywhere I go I see somebody I used to teach. Wherever I go, it’s always somebody that knows me,” Anderson said.