Word: keyworth
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Dates: during 1943-1943
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Once Hamtramckers boasted of their schools. Until he was killed in an auto accident in 1935, School Superintendent Maurice Reed Keyworth combined educational idealism and political savvy to create an astonishingly effective school system. Day & night schools enrolled 17,000 students-no less than 33% of the population. Teachers were (until the depression) well paid and protected from political pillaging by a merit system, the Keyworth Code. They hoped to change Hamtramck's character by raising a new generation of better citizens. Over the door of Copernicus High School was blazoned Keyworth's motto: "To develop individuals...
Economy or Something. When Keyworth died, the politicos went to work on the $1,000,000 school budget. In 1941 the seven-man School Board fired 41 married women teachers, said that other teachers who married would also be ousted. "Economy," explained the Board. The teachers brought suit, charged that the firings were-part of a scheme to give jobs to favorites, collect kickbacks on salaries. The Board, they declared, might better economize by calling off useless work invented for a maintenance force which had swollen...
Hamtramck's teachers won the support of the local Taxpayers Association and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. When the Board tried to increase its badgering of teachers by rescinding the Keyworth Code, the Circuit Court threatened a contempt action. Fifteen hundred students demonstrated against the Board...