Setting a high priority on educating their children, the early pioneer leaders organized school districts and issued bonds to build many schools throughout Aurora County, but then struggled to find and hire qualified teachers. By 1886, the county boasted twenty-one organized districts educating 1,703 students in seventy-two schools, many of them common schools in rural districts with a single teacher instructing all eight grades in a one-room building.
Many of those teachers, often young and female, had received only a common school education and then, after attending one summer session of a teacher’s academy, passed an examination and started teaching in the fall. At that time, teachers qualified for one of three levels of teaching certificates which indicated educational proficiency, age, and geographical limitations; the top level first-grade certificate, issued by the state, required a candidate to successfully pass an examination in fifteen subject areas, and allowed the person to teach in every county of the state, while the second and third-grade certificates were only valid in the county where issued. The lower level certificates expired within two years. Although most teachers needed to be at least eighteen years old, third-grade certificates allowed seventeen-year-olds to start teaching. In 1895, one third of the teachers in the county held first-grade certificates, with the other two-thirds were inexperienced teachers licensed to teach within the previous two years.
Youth and inexperience may have so overwhelmed some young teachers that they just quit going to school. Firesteel Township fired one teacher in 1892 after she failed to open the school for eight consecutive days and never gave any notice. In her annual report to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1898, County Superintendent Alice Shouse complained about the poor quality of education in which only nineteen of thirty-seven children passed the test to earn an eighth grade diploma, “Our corps of teachers is to a great extent derived from those young people who have had but a common school education and thus our pupils who, under well-qualified teachers, might go beyond the study of reading, writing and arithmetic are held back because the teacher cannot give them those higher things.”
Four years later, possibly as a result of more successful rates of graduation and an active teacher’s organization that met monthly to study education-related books and earn professional interest certificates, the County Superintendent Patrick Nolan wrote more positively, “The teachers of the county are among the most loyal in the state. Patient, progressive, self-sacrificing, they are ready and willing to carry forward any movement or suggestion for the benefit of the schools.
Female teachers always outnumbered male teachers, with women comprising 60 percent of the teaching staff in 1890, increasing to 79 percent in 1901. Firesteel Township paid the teachers $30 per month in 1884, dropping the pay to $25 per month the following year. The average teacher pay between 1890 and 1902 ranged from $26 to $28 per month, with male teachers earning about two dollars. In 1915, Plankinton Township paid teachers with a first-grade certificate $50 per month, reducing the pay $5 per hour for second-grade, and another $5 less per hour for third-grade certificate holders.
Educational skills were not necessarily the highest priority for some schools. Belford Township, with a concentration of Norwegian Lutherans, advertised their requirements in the Plankinton Herald newspaper, stating that she be “a young lady, must not dance, nor have fellows; must not chew gum, nor drink ice cream sodas or have any social ills that the present generation is addicted to.”
Many teachers only taught one year in a given township, either moving to another township or giving up the profession after one year in the classroom. In the four to five schools holding classes in Dudley Township between 1891 and 1909, thirty-seven teachers taught only one year, eight taught for two years, and five taught more than two yars. Jessie Linklater, who lived at home with her widowed mother, taught in Dudley Township for thirteen years. One married woman, Bridgett O’Neill Jones, taught two years, then married, and taught another two years. Six male teachers were hired in that timeframe with two of them each teaching for two years in the township.
Estella Hanson, a young woman who had completed high school, attended a teacher preparation summer school, passed the examination and was offered a teaching position in Dudley Township in 1890. Watson wrote candidly about her experience, “I was about ten miles from home, southwest, in a Welsh neighborhood. Many were the experiences and hardships of that eight months: $25.00 a month, do my own janitor work; rustle my own kindling; no dictionary; no water, but coal was provided. The Welsh children were glad and very cooperative so we got along fine until the cold weather came. My boarding house was one and a half miles from the schoolhouse.”
“The cold northwest winds were hard to face sometimes. On one occasion a strong wind came up after I started, filling the air with snow. I thought of turning back but that some of my pupils might be there so kept struggling on. When I reached the schoolhouse my left ear and foot were so frozen, my hands too were numb. I almost perished. Finally about five o’clock when no one came for me I managed to drag myself back to my boarding place. All the sympathy I got was that I was a big fool for trying to go in such a storm.”
Teachers, in those early years, faced many challenges, as they not only educated the local youth, but often organized events that brought community together. That story will be told in the next month’s article.
Note: The Hanson memoir, “Early Life of Estella Hanson Watland: 1872-1950,” was obtained from the archives of the Friends of the Middle Border, Inc. dba Dakota Discovery Museum, Mitchell, SD.
It Happened Right Here: The Schoolmarm, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, January 26, 2017.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 