Do you know anyone whose teacher's husband acted as Santa Claus at Christmas and had dogs make reindeer footprints during the night? When the kids came to school the next day, they were told Santa had visited in the night. Well, one of the children in the classroom was Mrs. Barrows, who attended Leverett Center School from 1936-1937 for first and second grade.The Center School supposedly had a red roof, and so its nickname was the "Little Red Schoolhouse." There were 30 students in one room. The class was divided in half for first and second grade.
There was no running water, so every day, two students would get water from other houses. They both carried an end of a pole, which had the bucket of water hanging from the center of the pole. For heat, the caretaker started a fire in a wood stove.
For first and second grade Mrs. Barrows had Mrs. Dodge. For third grade, she attended the East Leverett School. Mrs. Barrow's subjects were math, spelling, reading, and writing, along with a 15-minute recess and a 45-minute lunch.
There was no pain for discipline, because the kids were always quiet. "We knew what was expected of us, and that's what we did." They said the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer. If they were bad, the teacher would tell them they did something wrong in front of the whole class.
For playground equipment they had swings and slides. At the Center School, the girls made a natural bench out of rocks. The games they played were jump rope, hide-and-go-seek, and find-the-object, where the teacher would hide objects and the kids would try to find them. In May, students would circle the May pole and wrap streamers around it. On the last day of school, the teacher would have a barbecue at her house for all the students in her school.
-Forrester and Ben