Puerto Rico needs Federal aid to offer equal educational opportunity to all. Of 650,000 of school age only 280,000 in school. After exhausting possible resources can afford only $11 per child of school age. Passage of S. B. 1313 only hope of relief.

(The telegram referred to above is printed on p. 394:)

The CHAIRMAN. Congressman John J. Sparkman from the State of Alabama.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN J. SPARKMAN, CONGRESSMAN FROM THE STATE OF ALABAMA

The CHAIRMAN. Congressman, will you make what introductory statement you want to about yourself, and then proceed as you see fit?

Mr. SPARKMAN. Mr. Chairman, it is my understanding that I was asked to appear before this committee as a substitute for the Honorable John H. Tolan of California, who is chairman of the special House committee which has been investigating interstate migration.

Mr. Tolan was unable to appear and asked me to bring to you some of the findings of our committee which should be of interest to this committee in considering the matter of Federal aid to education.

In the last 20 years there has been a decided change in the character of migration in America. Since the development of the automobile and automobile travel the unit in migration has become, to a large extent, the family. Previous to that time the unit was the individualusually the unattached male. This change has brought about new problems in the field of education and I wish to touch on two of these problems especially.

The first of these problems has to do with the effect of the impact of large numbers of migrant children on the educational systems of their States of destination.

The second has to do with the necessity for proper education, including technical and trade education, in those sections of the country from which the largest number of migrants have come in the last 2 decades.

In the report of this committee which was submitted to Congress on April 3, 1941, the committee stated as follows:

Throughout the country the committee has been impressed with the extent to which expert witnesses and the migrants themselves have indicated the need for greatly increased vocational training and guidance as part of the secondary education of young people in both industrial and agricultural areas.

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Later in the report the committee stated that the "appropriate standing committees of the House continue to devote attention to the problems of soil improvement, farm prices, new markets, vocational training The committee made no specific recommendations as to the method of handling the problem of vocational training and guidance, because that, we felt, came within the province of the regular legislative committees.

In regard to the problem of the education of the migrant child we had many recommendations made to our committee. In the Montgomery hearing John E. Bryan, State administrator of the National Youth Administration, said:

Educational facilities, including libraries, available to southeastern farm youth must be enlarged. This improvement can be accomplished only by means of

financial assistance from the Federal Government. Such assistance may be partly met by an expansion of the National Youth Administration student work program, but it should also be approached from the viewpoint of expanding the general educational budgets of the affected areas, through Federal grants, since the Federal Government is the only agency that has the power and ability to tax the wealth of the entire Nation for the benefit of the children of the entire Nation. In the Washington hearings held in December, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins testified as follows:

Then with regard to education, I think we cannot, in this country endure a situation where we do not have adequate school facilities for all of our children whether their families find it necessary to move around as migrants, or whether they are settled in a high-standard community.

We cannot bear this unfairness of opportunity offered to young children. So I think we have to look forward to State and Federal aid, when necessary, in order to secure equal educational advantages and opportunity.

In the California hearings held in San Francisco and Los Angeles we had a large number of witnesses who testified as to the effect upon the schools of the large number of children of migrants moving into the State in the last 10 years. I make reference to the testimony of Mrs. Walter A. Knapp, who represented the California Congress of Patents and Teachers. In her statement she said:

The State chairman conducted a general survey. Twelve counties responded to the over 300 questionnaires sent out, but no county returned a complete report. The following is a compilation of some of the items on these reports representing approximately 400 camps.

Seven thousand one hundred and sixty families were reported with 22,257 children, 18,879 of whom are in school; 1,602 of these children worked in the fields after school hours.

Two thousand nine hundred and fifty-five families lived in tents, 1,026 in 1room cabins, 789 in 2-room cabins, and 259 families lived in 3 or more rooms. Twenty-six were reported as having electricity, 30 having running water. Federal camps and most growers' camps have some showers.

All

Only five camps were reported to have Sunday school, church, and library services available. Only three had adult-education classes.

Motion pictures were taken of two Federal camps, three growers' camps, two squatter's camps, five shanty towns, and one emergency school.

From July 1936 to June 1937, Dr. Anita Laverman of the State department of health made a study of 1,000 children of migratory agricultural laborers in California. A comparable survey was made on 1,000 resident children in rural centers. The following are a few conclusions briefly stated:

Migratory American children, 85 percent of whom have been in the State less than 3 years, were found to have medical and hygienic defects in 23 percent more cases than resident American children examined in the rural areas of California during the same year. Furthermore, facilities for the correction of medical defects in these children through private medical care or county hospitals is limited to a very small number of them.

I should be glad for the committee to read all of Mrs. Knapp's statement and testimony which appears in Part 6 of our hearings on pages 2432 to 2457, inclusive, and which deals largely with the problem as it has developed in the Pacific coast area. Many other witnesses from the Pacific coast States touched on this subject and all of them agreed that in those areas where a large amount of migrant labor is acquired in the harvesting of their seasonal crops, the schools face a very seasonable problem of overcrowding and a lack of teaching staff. The fact that the migrant children are seldom in school for an entire session but move from place to place adds to the seriousness of the problem there. In one county, Madera County, in southern California, they have used the system of mobile schools to pretty good effect. This is described by Dr. Lee Alexander Stone of that

county in his article on page 3052 of the Los Angeles hearings as follows:

Education. The school population of Madera County has increased by leaps and bounds in recent years. Every school in Madera, Chowchilla, and in all sections west and northwest of Madera has been hard put to properly care for the increased load of attendance that has been put upon them by migrants. Elementary and high schools have been compelled to add new buildings or extra rooms to their schools to take care of the increased load.

School facilities are now adequate to handle all migrant children, with the exception of the city of Chowchilla which needs for the present load eight additional schoolrooms. A recently passed school bond issue of $70,000 will take care of this bad situation.

Overcrowding at first did affect in many places in the county the efficiency of teaching. Today this has been overcome by new additions to present school buildings.

Madera County has 7 migratory schools employing 11 teachers. In all instances these schools are of modern construction. All attend

There never has been any discrimination against migrant children. ants in the schools are treated alike. another.

No favoritism is ever shown one pupil over

No discrimination against migrant adults ever has been shown. The honorable hard-working migrant receives respect at the hands of every good citizen of the community.

Mr. Chairman, if I may digress there, I want to say I set this out in order to show how the State of California has attempetd to meet the problem, and the result of our studies is to the effect that California is the only State that has made any appreciable headway against this tremendous problem.

These conditions pertaining to the migratory schools pertain only to the State of California.

Mr. Varden Fuller of the United States Bureau of Agricultural Economics at Berkeley, Calif., in his statement before the committee, included the following:

Only this last-mentioned factor can be directly associated with recent migration. As a result of additional capital outlay for schools necessitated by migration, owners of agricultural land in the Linda and Ella school districts have had to carry an added burden in the form of a higher tax rate unaccompanied by any manifest benefits. On the other hand, the migrants who have settled in these areas have themselves become substantial taxpayers, not only in the form of sales taxes, but also by virtue of their ownership of land purchased at excessive prices in the subdivided districts south of Marysville.

In conclusion, local government costs in Yuba County have increased sharply in recent years due primarily to a return to normal spending following a business depression and to the acceptance of certain new responsibilities by all levels of government.

In many cases, distressed migrants, as victims of the business depression, have temporarily become objects of public assistance but in no case can they be said to have caused a serious problem in local government finance because (a) they are themselves important contributors of State and local taxes, and (b) all welfare activities, with the important exception of the county hospital, are financed largely by the State and Federal Governments.

Mr. Frederick Arpke, also of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics at Berkeley, said in respect to a question by a member of our committee:

As far as education is concerned in the State as a whole, the increase in the cost of education has not been phenomenal. I have indicated in this paper that the increase on a per pupil basis, for example, rather than on an average daily attendance basis, has for elementary schools been only $1 per elementary pupil. As far as high schools, there has been a substantial decrease per pupil.

Mr. CURTIS. There have been other things that have caused the increase in tax costs for education, besides, of course, the addition of students, due to the coming of the migrants?

Mr. ARPKE. That is quite true. And I tried to point out in the paper that it is very dangerous to overemphasize simply the migrant influence itself, because there are so many other things that have been taking place at the same time. The condition of general unemployment, for example, the changes in the income status of a county or the whole State, changes in the type of responsibility that the State shares for education or that the county shares in education. We have had some great changes in those things in California.

The following extract from the technical supplement to our report expresses the opinion of J. W. Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education, and gives his suggestions for a possible solution:

The educational handicaps experienced by migrant children are described in later sections. In addition to the effect on educational advancement due to the migratory process itself, there is the problem of providing school facilities. This was pointed out by J. W. Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education: "School budgets are invariably prepared early in the school year and taxes are levied shortly thereafter. If a fairly constant number of children of seasonal workers come into a school district at a definite time each year, that fact can be considered at the time of preparing the budget. On the other hand, if the number is not constant, or a very large number comes unexpectedly, the difficulty is obvious.

"Seasonal workers employed in the raising and harvesting of crops, move not only within States, but frequently from State to State. *

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"The problem of providing suitable building facilities in a district which has an influx of 200 migratory children for only 2 months each year is a special problem." In California, "State funds, not to exceed $75 per teacher, and an equal amount of county funds, may be used for salaries of teachers of migratory children whenever in the judgment of the county superintendent and county board of education such teacher or teachers are necessary." However, California is the only State with a law of this kind. Commissioner Studebaker further noted that under the national defense program a further financial problem has been created that is too burdensome even under the California arrangement.

"The funds provided for this purpose, however, are hardly sufficient for such extraordinary demands as required for the establishment and maintenance of schools for children of workers on the Mount Shasta Dam and for those of laborers on national-defense projects in the school district of Vallejo at the present time, No other State has a provision of law similar to this."

The following possible solution was suggested by Commissioner Studebaker: "1. A definite policy which includes:

"(a) Residence of pupils: Provision for the schooling of childern irrespective of the time they have lived in the State.

"(b) Compulsory attendance: Provision for the compulsory attendance of all children of migratory workers, as of nonmigratory children.

"(c) Financial program: Provision for State funds for the support of all Stateapproved schools for migratory children.

"(2) Definite Federal Government policy which includes:

“(a) Authorization for continuing appropriation sufficient to pay all salaries of the teachers necessary for children who have migrated into the respective States during the current school year.

"(b) Special provision for the use of Federal Government funds for schoolbuilding purposes in emegency situations, such as the school-building crisis now present in many communities as a result of the national-defense activities." From the testimony of other witnesses who testified on this subject I take the following extracts:

The situation in Oregon was indicated in a letter from Rex Putnam, superintendent of schools in that State, portraying conditions in Yamhill and Malheur Counties as similar to those described immediately above for California. Mr. Putnam noted that "there are no State funds available for aiding these situations and the rural district does not always have the taxable wealth to provide facilities or teachers without sharp increases in taxes

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He added: "Children in the migratory workers' camps, however, are on Federal property and it, therefore, appears that they cannot be included on the school census. The camp property is no longer a school district when it comes under the control of

the Federal Government. The camps are in much the same position as Federal forests, game refuges, and military reserves in this respect.

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"It would appear the Federal Government should assume the responsibility when migrants are concentrated in camps in order to properly care for the education of the children therein."

Miss Helen White, midwestern migrant supervisor under the Council of Women for Home Missions stated at the Chicago hearings:

"No educational system will exclude the migratory child within the region of this hearing, but very little or no encouragement is given to the children of the migratory class to attend the schools in the areas in which they are living. Overcrowding the schools results in discouragement on the part of these children. This presents a picture that is unsafe for future democracy; namely, an uneducated constituency who will be the citizens of tomorrow. There are no adequate educational facilities available to these children, and in the consideration of this program, that phase must be given major emphasis.'

Miss Lenroot, in her testimony at the Washington hearings, made the following general recommendations:

"Special assistance by Federal and State governments in enabling communities with excessive migration, including those affected by the defense program, to provide adequate community health and welfare services and education opportunities for the children of migrants."

More specifically, Miss Lenroot recommended as deserving of "immediate consideration and action":

"Extension of Federal aid for general elementary and secondary education, as well as for vocational training, as recommended by the Advisory Committee on Education, the White House Conference on Children in a Democracy, and other organizations. Training of young people for defense industries and for vocational effectiveness after the emergency is over is impaired to the extent that basic educational preparation is defective in certain sections of the country and among certain population groups."

The need for reeducation in the problem presented by a large number of boys on the road was stated at the Los Angeles hearing, in a letter addressed to Chairman John H. Tolan by Msgr. Thomas J. O'Dwyer. Monsignor O'Dwyer estimated that there were "probably over 100,000 boys 'on the road' in September 1940." On the basis of experience in Los Angeles, Monsignor O'Dwyer made recommendations which he indicated might require modifications to adapt them to local conditions.

"As to the treatment of the general problem, and the disposition of the individual's problem, I would recommend that boys be cared for separately from men; that they be given care and shelter in small units of not more than 100 in any one camp or shelter; that the emphasis of the program be on counseling and guidance, and reeducation for proper living rather than on fire roads and fire breaks. While a boy's return to his legal residence is perhaps best in a majority of cases, provision should be made to rehabilitate those boys who have no homes or such homes that would be unfit. That a strong follow-up program be instituted, and that local facilities and social agencies be used whenever practical. That local advisory committees be formed, not only to interpret the program to the public, but actually to advise the local administrations on policies and matters pertaining to the individual's and community's good, and finally, a uniformity of the legal settlement laws of all the States of the Union."

In regard to the second part of the problem, that of the education of the youth in those sections of out-migration we had testimony in our New York hearings and in the Montgomery hearings bearing especially on this subject. In New York Mr. Glen Leet, administrator of public assistance of the State of Rhode Island, appeared before us and the following extract is taken from the hearing at New York:

"Mr. SPARKMAN. Now, going back to the other end of the age scale, the birth rate in these sections, in which I am particularly interested because that happens to be the condition that prevails in the part of the country from which I came. In studying the problem, do you think it only fair that we recognize the fact that the resources of those sections are heavily taxed in order to provide the cost of bringing those people up to the age that they attain before they migrate; for instance, schooling? We have an excess of population that must move into other sections of the country, and our resources naturally are heavily taxed in order to give them the schooling necessary to equip them to go out and hold those jobs that they seek.

"Mr. LEET. In your State, if you raise mules and ship them out of the State, people in other States pay you for the expense of raising them; but you raise the