Health

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Student health was an increasingly important facet of the educational experience in the twentieth century.

Previously, diseases and sickness could severely compromise the work of the school when large numbers of students became ill simultaneously. In December 1885, the Green School was closed for two weeks due to a case of scarlet fever, and in November, 1906, whooping cough at the school was prevalent, “causing a small attendance”. Diphtheria closed the school for a considerable length of time in the autumn of 1910, and in January, 1920, a number of cases of chicken pox were recorded. Eventually immunization clinics and improved health standards would help reduce these concerns and the threats to children’s health.

Preventative action was taken as well as in October, 1905, when the Green School was furnished with “test-type cards for testing the eyes of the pupils” in anticipation of a state law passed in 1906 requiring the appointment of school physicians and the annual testing of students’ sight and hearing. Each eye and both together were tested. 31 students at the Green School were tested and 3 were found “defective in eyesight” and 1 found “defective in hearing”, and their parents were notified. In some cases, poor academic performance was able to be attributed to poor vision, or, as put less sympathetically by the Superintendent’s report for 1905, “Many cases of apparent stupidity have been found due to poor vision.” The tests also had the benefit in aiding teachers in seating assignments and blackboard use.

Similar tests continued to be conducted throughout the remainder of the Green School’s operation. In 1929, an audiometer was first used in Middleborough schools to aid in the testing of hearing, the results previously having been “very unsatisfactory”.

In 1910, Dr. J. H. Burkhead was appointed largely to examine students between the ages of 14 and 16 who wished to work and who were required by law to have a physical examination by a school committee-appointed doctor. By 1912, however, Burkhead was officially serving as school physician and he had examined all children. At the Green, Burkhead examined 47 children and found 6 cases of hypertrophied tonsils, 7 cases of adenoids and 3 cases of defective teeth, findings which were consistent with those of the other schools. Besides working with parents to improve the health of the community’s children, under Burkhead’s direction the town began to pay closer attention to the sanitary conditions of each school.

Beginning in 1914, Burkhead began more detailed dental examinations of students “as Pathologists now believe that Defective teeth are incompatible with the proper moral and physical development of the child.” Through these examinations, Burkhead considered 11 of the Green’s 46 pupils to have defective teeth. In 1916, Burkhead was alarmed to find 25% of children in the public schools (including 13 of the 52 Green students) had defective teeth, and both he and Superintendent Bates recommended the establishment of a Dental Clinic to address the matter. While any defects found in students were initially communicated to parents by means of a letter advising them to further consult a dentist or the family physician, in 1920 the task of personally visiting parents devolved upon the school nurse due to the lack of response in a number of instances. In 1921, Burkhead described the tasks of the school nurse: “Aside from weighing school children and consulting with the parents of the ‘underweights,’ referring children to specialists for examination and treatment, procuring glasses for children who were in dire need of them, taking throat cultures of children who were exposed to diphtheria, giving health talks in the schools, she still has found time to make over three hundred home visits to consult with the parents and to urge them to have the defects found by [the] school physician corrected.”

The influenza pandemic in late 1918 forced the closure of the Green and all other public schools for a period of three weeks while a reoccurrence in November and December hampered a number of schools, though it is not known whether the Green was among them. In April, 1929, a smallpox outbreak similarly closed the school when the school vacation was advanced a week.

Students continued to be examined annually by the school department in order to ensure adequate health. In 1927 Green School students were weighed six times as part of School Nurse Helen Pasztor’s nutrition work, and in 1931, they were weighed twice. Any found to be underweight were weighed four times during the course of the year. Tonsils and adenoids continued to remain part of the routine examination and of 38 Green pupils examined in 1930, 4 were found to have “tonsil and adenoid defects.”

In 1929, a dental clinic was inaugurated with a $500 appropriation by the town. The clinic operated every Wednesday morning from October through June, and pupils who could not otherwise afford a dentist were treated for a fee of ten cents by Dr. R. W. Wood. At the time, the town also began the operation of a diphtheria clinic, providing immunizations for children between the ages of 6 months and ten years, as well as tuberculosis clinic.

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