trict. It was thus entirely voluntary, and the whole support was to come out of local taxes. This was doubtless the greatest mistake. In the stage of development in which the Arizona schools then were, it is not reasonable to suppose that they would take kindly to district taxation without Territorial support. In fact, this had been their very first experience. The acts of 1867 and 1868 which had placed school support on the local district entirely were a flat failure—no schools were organized.
Of this high-school law and its accomplishments Supt. Shewman said in 1899:
We have had cause to regret the lack of interest in, and, we might say, the opposition to, the establishment of high schools in the Territory. Our law at present is liberal in its encouragement of the organization of high schools, and there are many localities where one would prove of inestimable value to the cause of education. * * * No school system is perfect without the high school. There is a missing link which no other school can supply, unless, indeed, our normal and university must supply the stepping stone by being burdened with a grammar department to supply the course furnished by the high school. There are now in this Territory some high schools existing under the old law and keeping up the course as prescribed under the old law, but there is but one that is recognized as having legal existence under the latest act of the legislative assembly, that at Phoenix. This school is in a most prosperous condition.
The first school organized under the law of 1895 was the Union High School at Phoenix, which had been in course of evolution since 1880. It had even graduated a few pupils and it now entered upon a real course of development. The next high school organized was that of Mesa, Maricopa County, which began work with the session of 1901–2. There were 164 “advanced-grade” pupils reported for 1901 and 151 the next year. In 1904 a third high school was organized at Prescott, in Yavapai County. There were reported in that year 278 pupils in the three high schools, with an average attendance of 218, and with 1,000 volumes in the libraries at Union and Mesa. The three had a total income of $14,188.44, with a total expenditure of $13,443.54, of which $7,182.07 went for the payment of salaries. The statistics to date available are neither continuous, complete, nor uniform; nor are the statistics given by High School Inspector Dr. Neil for 1915–16 as complete as they should be. In the absence of more complete reports the figures are given as they appear in the Territorial and State reports.
