About Discipline At Gainesville High, Circa 1940

One of the issues that keeps bobbing up in our Georgia political campaigns nowadays is about discipline in our public schools. The other day one of Gainesville's infamous coffee clubs got in a conversation about school discipline ... only this time they were remembering what discipline was like in Gainesville High School in the 1930's and 1940's. From local schools you had people like Bub Dunlap, Sid Smith, Carl Lawson, John Burl Hulsey There were others, but for the moment we were focusing on local schools, and what had brought the subject up was a column Johnny Vardeman had written about a teacher, now 99, who maintained absolute order in her classes.

It was the era when C. J. Cheeves was Superintendent of Gainesville Schools, and he maintained his office in Gainesville high, which at the time was just off the square, where the Gym of '36 is now located.

Anyway, most teachers had their own method for keeping discipline in their classrooms, and for the most part classes were orderly. But if some student got out of hand, and especially if a student did things that disturbed the other students in the classroom, the teacher sat the student on a stool in the hallway, just outside the classroom door. Once an hour Mr. Cheeves walked the hallways, and if a kid was sitting on a stool outside the classroom everybody knew all hell was about to break loose. Absolutely no student wanted to push a teacher to the point where they were banished to a stool in the hallway. And certainly no student wanted to push C. J. Cheeves to the point where he called the parents and invited them to his office to have a discussion with their youngster.

As this group remembers it, we didn't have big problems with discipline in school in those days.

This is Gordon Sawyer from a window on historic Green Street

http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/9/189797