Acting upon these convictions, other college women have been active in the attempt to introduce various branches of the new science into the public schools of their cities, among which may be mentioned Buffalo, Cambridge, and Detroit.
In Boston, college women have applied sanitary science directly to the public schools, as well as helping to secure it in the course of instruction. During 1895 a committee of five, constituted by the Boston branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, investigated the sanitary conditions of the public schools and achieved most noteworthy results. This committee consisted of Mrs. Alice Upton Pearmain, then president of the Boston branch, and now president of the general association; Mrs, Ellen H. Richards, Mrs. Alice P Norton, Miss E. May Dame, and Miss Helena S. Dudley, then head worker of the Boston College Settlement.
One hundred and ninety-three schools of the different grades were investigated. Among them some were found to be entirely unfit for school purposes, a number being unworthy the expense of repairs, others being hired rooms in old dwellings, and one school even being in the basement of a grocery store.
While a grant had been asked and obtained from the Legislature for two million dollars for new buildings, it was found that there were already about seven thousand unoccupied seats in the schools.
In one school the lighting was found to be so bad that eight cases of inflammation of the eyes were sent to the hospital for treatment in one month, while ventilation from within was unworthy of mention, and impossible from without, because of the constant noise from chopping in the wood yard close by, and because of odors from the old-style vaults in the yard and from a near stable containing eighty or ninety horses.
Such conditions were by no means exceptional. Indeed, inadequate heating apparatus, lack of ventilation (eighty per cent of the methods of ventilation not working well), bad odors, and insufficient light were found to exist in the majority of buildings.
Very indefinite rules were also found regulating janitors' duties, with the result that in nearly half of the buildings rooms were dusted only once a week with a feather duster, disinfectants were used in only fifty-seven schools, and the floors in fifty-nine schools had never been washed since built in a period of years ranging from fifty to five years.
This committee has had the satisfaction of securing reform in nearly every instance which was a matter of domestic science, while others requiring legislative enactment are pending.
Such and many more similar instances of the unsanitary conditions of the schools, brought to the attention of those in authority
