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The Training School left its mark on their lives

Now they want to be certain they leave a special memorial to it

The first building erected for the children of the Training School was constructed from scrap lumber. Because it resembled a milking shed, it got stuck with the nickname the Dairy Barn.

More than 80 years ago it was for some of them, the day that they set off in their best bib and tucker for the first day of school at East Texas State. They were just kids, five to seventeen years old, so they couldn’t know then that they weren’t merely starting grade school at what happened to be a college campus—they were entering a brotherhood of students and teachers who would be forever marked by the Training School.

Helen Douglass (BA ’27), an original student of the Training School, is one of those on whom the school made a lasting impression. For her, that impression included high expectations and discipline. In other words, she was just too durn scared to be bad.

The wicked Miss Pickett?

“There was old Miss Pickett at the end of the hall,” Helen says, and her crinkled eyes still widen with something akin to alarm. “When we got excited, our childish voices would carry down that hallway. But Miss Pickett made certain we didn’t do it but once, by cracky.”

That’s Mrs. Lalla H. Pickett, who was the Training School supervisor from 1917 to 1924 and who—at least to look at her photo in the school yearbook—was a lovely, youthful woman. But the impressions Helen carries are those of the sixth-grade girl she was when she started at the Training School. And those impressions are strong ones that come easily to her as she sits up in her bed at the Oak Manor Nursing Home in Commerce.

She recalls how honored she was to learn that she, out of all the students in Commerce ISD, was among the few chosen to attend the Training School “The superintendent picked good students, not laggards,” as candidates, she says with more than a little touch of pride. Then she remembers the thrill of learning that her mother would let her attend, despite some naysayers’ warnings about what was, after all, a rather newfangled notion for education.

T.S. at education's cutting edge

The Training School, or “T.S.” as it was often dubbed (actually, its official—though rarely used—name was the Demon-stration School), was started at ET to pro- vide college students planning to be teachers the chance to practice their skills. Through the years about 60 student teachers annually would come under the tutelage of a “boss teacher,” as Helen says the children called their permanent teacher.

So while some parents might have considered it risky to send their children to a school staffed with a steady flux of inexperienced instructors, the parents of those children who did attend the Training School decided it also offered a number of advantages.

It added a kindergarten class, long before the idea of educating five year olds was widely accepted. Upper-level students could take classes in sewing, cooking, woodworking, and mechanical drawing. In an age when it wasn’t unusual for a public school teacher to not have any kind of college degree, a number of T.S. instructors had their master’s.

Alumni remember school's influence

When in the 1924 school year the T.S. found a home in the brand-new Education Building (these days the Ferguson Social Sciences Building), Raymond Cameron (BS ‘40) was one of that year’s kindergartners who helped initiate the new facility. From those very first days, he says, the Training School began to leave its mark on his life.

For Raymond, it was school athletics and the Cubs (a junior version of the college Lions) that would impress upon him the value of school spirit and competition. He remembers the teachers who didn’t think he and his young classmates were too childish to appreciate the beauty of a work by Shakespeare or Raphael. He remembers how much he respected Mr. Watson.

E.H. Watson directed the school for 20 years until its closing in 1948. Many of his students remember, as does Raymond, “Mr. Watson coming into the room with an armful of papers and a bunch of pencils. When we saw that, we knew what was coming.” It seems one of the things T.S. kids had to get used to was being a guinea pig for the latest round of achievement tests.

Mostly he remembers the special feeling he and others got just from being a part of the Training School. “We were different and we knew it,” he says with feeling.

Saturday school

Going to school on a college campus had its own quirks, T.S. alumni recall, including the mingling of Training School children with ET coeds.

“They knew us, and we knew them,” Helen says. “During recess, the college students wanted to play with us.”

Students at the secondary level might find themselves taking a class with college students, with the teacher dividing time between the groups. Helen remembers, “When I got my high school diploma, I stood by a man married and with two kids.”

In order to accommodate the schedules of student teachers, T.S. students were out on Mondays but went to school on Saturdays. The first six weeks of every summer they had to go to school. But that wasn’t the worst of it, according to Bruce Hineman (BS ’59, MEd ‘60), who happened to be going to the Training School when it closed in 1948. Say “Training School” to Bruce, and the first thing he remembers is the odor of a certain food cooking in the cafeteria. He says with fervor: “I can still smell those awful carrots.”

Carrots aside, the Training School nevertheless broadened Bruce’s horizons a bit. Long before it was in vogue, T.S. elementary students were taking Spanish. And he remembers to this day when his music teacher played Tchaikovsky’s “Peter and the Wolf” for the class. “I loved it,” Bruce says. “I love it to this day.”

Like Bruce, Raymond today is impressed with the education he got from the Training School. “Miss Creagh taught art, and she didn’t do it with