Looking Back: Wartime demands prompt unusual solutions 

During World War II every segment of society faced major changes, and schools were no different.

California schools opened their shop classes to train workers for war industries and organized “victory corps” to train young men for military service. Some districts put their seniors on a fast track to help them graduate before reporting for duty. Schools rearranged schedules to allow students to study four hours and work four hours in what 1944 California School Trustees Association President Louise L. Hector called “the war producing program.” Schools also arranged extra child care centers, some open 24 hours a day, for mothers working in war industries.

In Long Beach, Douglas Aircraft contracted with the school district for the services of 4,000 16- and 17-year-olds to work split shifts after school. Some 30,000 Los Angeles boys and girls worked in a similar program.

An influx of 95,000 workers to shipyards in the East Bay area of Northern California required hasty construction of thousands of housing units. Planners gave little thought to the children those workers would bring with them, so area schools scrambled to find extra classrooms and teachers. Most schools ran on double shifts to accommodate all the students. Juvenile delinquency increased as many children were left on their own after school by parents working late shifts.

With many able-bodied men away at war and Japanese Americans confined to internment camps, farmers found themselves without enough workers to harvest their crops. “More than thirty harvest camps for boys and girls are reported as active during the harvest months,” reported the October 1943 CSTA Bulletin. “Many of these camps were sponsored by schools and several thousands of young people have been given steady employment in agriculture through this medium.”

CSTA helped prepare districts for this demand on students by publishing a leaflet, “Use of Student Workers in Agriculture,” which laid out standards for harvest camps and programs. At the 1943 convention, a director of the Farm Production Council thanked California schools for their prompt response to the manpower crisis, noting that without the boys, girls and women freed up by school initiatives, which provided one-quarter of the agricultural labor force, California could not have saved its crops that year. In 1942, 50,000 students worked in the harvests.

Summarizing the 1943 convention, Dr. Virgil E. Dickson, chief educational officer of the Federal Works Agency for Western States, foresaw that the world ahead would run at a faster pace. “While the war has brought many changes and many difficulties to the schools, the peace that may be ahead of us and the new world which it will bring may produce more problems and greater difficulties than those we know today. ... This new world in which man’s inventions have practically annihilated time and space challenges both our courage and our adaptability.”