Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up by Victor D. Brooks Page A

An extensive editorial essay in the October 1952
Life
magazine focused on overcrowding in one New York City school. Max Francke, the principal of a school with 2,011 students in a building with a capacity of 1,470, was engaged in an endless game of musical chairs with his Boomer kindergarten and first-grade pupils. “My teachers are tired, the crowding is getting them down, there are so many five and six year olds, and they will move up through the higher grades next year.”
    All students at the school were required to wear paper name and address tags while mothers were given a printed timetable to let them know when the teachers would bringtheir children to the school door. Francke noted that the enrollment of 245 in the second grade was dwarfed by the 430 first-graders who overwhelmed school capacity. “Over 500 children are getting five hours less class work than the law requires, and they confuse parents by entering and leaving at odd hours” in the first stage of a split-shift configuration. One mother who had two children in different shifts complained, “For years I’ve been looking forward to getting both kids from under my feet at the same time. Now that isn’t happening.”
    As traditional school buildings were engulfed by the surging enrollment, officials opened classrooms in town halls, firehouses, and church basements. A few desperate districts turned school buses into classrooms between their pickups and deliveries. The Linda Mar housing estate, fifteen miles east of San Francisco, rented eleven of its homes as schools for $850 a month. A Long Island developer demonstrated his civic spirit by paying construction crews to work overtime and weekends to prepare ten houses as classrooms in time for the post–Labor Day surge of new pupils. As classes met, tractors were still smoothing dirt in front yards. Partitions were temporarily left out of construction in order to provide classrooms with enough space to hold the swelling student population. The pastor of a suburban Philadelphia Catholic parish purchased a house across the street from the school, placed the first-graders in the building, and received township provision for an all-day crossing guard to shepherd six-year-olds across the street to use the main building’s lavatories.
    The national shortage of classrooms, which reached 370,000 by 1953, was matched by a burgeoning teacher deficit which one educational writer attributed to “matrimony, maternity and more money elsewhere.” During the ensuingdecade, nearly 200,000 teaching appointments would be left unfilled at the close of each academic year, yet the most sensible solution to attract new people to the profession—substantial pay raises—always seemed to be the last resort. West Hartford, Connecticut, which counted 109 unfilled teaching positions in a staff of 400, encouraged new applicants with a community square dance, help in finding housing, a Rotary Club welcome luncheon, and gifts to anyone who signed a contract. The PTA pooled its resources to locate families willing to take in teachers as temporary boarders at little or no rent. On a national level, magazine advertisements and television public service programs portrayed teachers as key personnel in the expansion of the American economy and the defense of liberty. Placed among color photos of new refrigerators and ranges, the Norge Corporation announced that “American elementary schools are now short 120,700 teachers—this means overcrowded classes, half days, and other shortcomings. Write for practical information that you can do as a concerned citizen.”
    Journals specializing in educational affairs devoted entire issues to the Boomer tidal wave. In “Our Children Are Still Being Cheated” in its October 1953 issue, the
Elementary School Journal
warned that worse problems were on the way as “the number of children will increase another 1.6 million this year, and by