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A Side-Light on the N.Y.A.Sarah Elizabeth BundyWHEN the first bulletin of directions regarding the National Youth Administration reached me, I felt like jumping out my office window and calling it a day. The burden of my job as girls' vice-principal in a cosmopolitan high school was sufficiently heavy and varied without additions. The thought of creating jobs and placing girls in them, and of winding and unwinding all the necessary red tape involved in a nation-wide plan of this sort, filled me with despair. Now, after nearly two years of experience, I have a few comments to make. They are in no sense scientific. I am presenting no statistics; summarizing no formal survey. I am merely recording impressions of the NYA experiment in one situation, more or less typical. It was clear in the beginning that the easy way would be to assign students to NYA work during a period of their regular school day, when teachers are available to supervise them. But if the project were to fulfill an educational purpose, I could not reconcile such a policy. Accordingly, all assignments were made for hours outside classroom periods. This required ingenuity to find suitable employment, especially for girls. Boys can be handled more readily in assisting persons employed in the school plant. Added to this perplexity was the fact that candidates, at least in the first crop, were largely unemployable. The initial regulations for the NYA limited the assignability to students whose families were on certain local relief rolls. That very fact told the story in many cases. During these years many persons are on relief through no fault of their own, yet it is a fact that persons either incompetent or indifferent, as far as employment is concerned, bulk large on the rolls. Naturally their offspring bear some of the parental earmarks. However, "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die." Common sense told me that I must be opportunist enough to make the most of the task before me. Perhaps, after all, more good than bad would eventuate. Accordingly, I ceased inward grumbling and got to work. The negative and positive impressions follow: NEGATIVE: There is danger that a pupil of limited physical strength as well as of slender pocketbook will be overly ambitious and take on more than he should. This hazard needs to be watched carefully. Many of my applicants should use the hour available for rest and recreation, not for work. I am thinking now of an over-grown orphan girl of sixteen who carries the physical result of having broken child labor laws in her earlier years. Virtually always she has been on her own. Her size and apparent maturity have been both her asset and her liability. It was easy for her to pass for sixteen when she was only fourteen and now at sixteen she could pass readily for eighteen. That did not protect her, however, from the results of the back-breaking work which the laws regulating fruit-packing were definitely designed to avoid. Now she must go once a week to a clinic for treatments for physical defects resulting directly from overwork in childhood. It is apparent that she should not be an NYA worker, and yet her overwhelming need prompted me to assign her to after-school desk work which would be as little drain as possible upon her physical strength. There are others of the same sort, though possibly no other cases so extreme. She serves to illustrate this danger. Providing an NYA assignment to a student of superior scholarship without giving him any work to do is an opportunity that I cannot accept. We have certain boys and girls eligible on that basis, but not one of them has been assigned. Wrong though my viewpoint may be, I cannot bring myself so far to lower the standards of scholarship and the incentive to do for the sake of doing, for the reward of thirty cents an hour. But quite as serious as the possibility of jeopardizing physical or intellectual values is that of creating an unfortunate social attitude. In the past, school service has been tendered freely by many pupils during study periods and after hours. This is as it should be, for obviously the student, through the experience thus gained, usually has benefited even more than the school itself. I cannot but fear that this spontaneous expression of loyalty may be endangered if too many activities are assigned on a monetary basis. It is obvious that a student with limited social sensibilities will question gratuitous service on his part when he sees that others are being paid for similar work. In connection with this social attitude is the fact that, as NYA jobs are assigned to outstanding students, it becomes popular to seek them. During the second year of NYA the applications increased many fold. Community welfare workers rather too readily advise school children in needy families to seek such employment without first ascertaining whether the school quota of assignments (a number determined by federal allotment, not by the local school) will permit additions. This, of course, leads only to embarrassment and disappointment. I am reminded here of an ironically amusing incident. One day when a notice appeared on the bulletin board, "NYA checks have arrived. Call for yours," a dozen or more applicants who had never been assigned, or even approved, expectantly reported for their checks. Evidently manna from Heaven, or Washington, is still anticipated. Positive: Happily, however, there is another side to the picture. At the beginning, the disadvantages rather overwhelmed me, but as months have passed, as payrolls—complicated though they are—have been tallied and checked, as girls have thrilled at the receipt of warrants from the federal government, I have come to realize that wisdom really did promote the plan, for day by day positive values accumulate. In the first place, the girls who actually had not had proper lunches or decent shoes or carfare to bring them long distances, gained not only relief from these hardships and worries, but an increased self-respect. Even $6 a month can go far toward providing those small things that let a girl hold her head up. A few of these girls had been bad attendance problems, partly because of lack of carfare and other necessities. But the lack of incentive to attend regularly also had operated. With NYA assignments somehow the fact that they had jobs to do, not merely, I think, because they were being paid, motivated regular attendance as nothing else had done. Certainly this fact presents a challenge to a thoughtful educator. When school stimulates as much responsibility and interest as a job, truancy largely will disappear. The experience and training that these girls have received in their NYA assignments represent a definite virtue of the plan. I have seen a listless, apparently incompetent girl transformed within three brief months into an alert, dependable worker, eager to begin her assignment and reluctant to stop when it was time to go home. One girl, awkward and oversized—a gland case—who previously made minor ailments the excuse for staying home, was assigned to serve ice water at noon in the cafeteria She has scarcely missed a day and is far more agile and decidedly neater in appearance than when I doubtfully assigned her. Most of the NYA tasks have been really worth-while, not, as I anticipated, mere "busy work." Some good natured teachers have prolonged their own day to assume the role of employers. But in many instances virtue truly has had its own reward for their student employee have rendered service far beyond our most optimistic expectations. The NYA is a temporary agency, a part of the federal government's relief program. It must be regarded as an emergency undertaking liable to liquidation. But if out of the NYA experience throughout the country a few hundreds of thousands of boys and girls of high school and college age become inoculated with the virus of steady work; if the positive results outweigh increasingly the negative; if some of us who have professional association with the plan are learning lessons and gaining new ideas which will carry over into permanent channels, then surely the NYA can be counted a success.
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