have to be in school the year round to attend the cattle; otherwise there would be loss from freezing during the winter and starvation during the summer, as responsibility will be placed very heavily upon the students.

18. Apprentice teachers, $10,000 (new item, increase, $10,000). Our present requirements for teachers specify 2 years of experience in addition to certain types of training. Since Congress has established an educational loan fund for Indian youth, a number of promising Indian young men and women are attending colleges and universities to fit themselves as advisers, teachers, social workers, or other positions for service to their people. We propose to use this amount for the establishment of a number of apprentice positions to which the most promising of these graduates will be assigned.

Our proposal further contemplates assigning these young graduates to work under the direction and guidance of our most successful and competent Indian Service instructors. It will be necessary to provide these apprentices with a small remuneration during their period of training to care for their living expenses. A salary of $660 a year net is proposed.

Language changes. We have incorporated a number of proposed changes in the text of this appropriation in order to clarify the purposes for which the funds may be used.

For many years there has been language in the annual appropriation act exempting this Service from the requirement for formal contracts for compliance with section 3744 of the Revised Statutes (U. S. C., title 41, sec. 16), in connection with payment of tuition for Indian pupils attending public schools, higher educational institutions, or schools for the deaf and dumb, blind, physically handicapped or mentally deficient. Nevertheless, the General Accounting Office has required us to submit informal agreements bearing contract numbers and has disallowed payments for public-school attendance or other services included in the exemption for any period prior to the date of the authority for expenditure issued by the Indian Service. This frequently works an injustice as it is possible for the issuing of authorities to be delayed until after the date the service begins, through no fault of the public school or institution receiving the child. This sometimes occurs when correspondence is necessary over important details. The child is received in the school or institution but there is delay in reaching an exact agreement which enables us to issue a definite authority for expenditure of the money. Relief from this requirement is important to retain the goodwill of public-school systems and institutions cooperating with the Indian Service in care and education of Indian children.

These

Ability to care for feeble-minded children is of utmost importance. cases are sometimes presented as requiring urgent and immediate attention, the young person having become a menace to himself or herself, and to society. Under a requirement of the Comptroller General's Office, no payments for publicschool tuition nor for care and education of children in institutions may be made prior to the date of the authority for expenditure of funds involved. It has been necessary to put boys in institutions for the feeble-minded without securing prior authority as they showed criminal tendencies and a major infraction of law seemed imminent. Sometimes a social worker or other field worker has found deaf, blind, or crippled children who could have been placed in school if they could have taken the child along. By the time authority for incurring the expense involved was secured the parents had lost interest or the family had moved. It is essential to a humane handling of the welfare of this class of unfortunate children that the local superintendent have some leeway. Without training the children are deprived of the occupations and pleasures common to normal individuals. They hold back the social and economic life of their families when they do not become actual social liabilities.

In the past when poverty, communicable disease in the home, lack of care, and oversight of the children or other conditions have resulted in removal of Indian children from their homes, they have been placed in Government boarding schools or in mission schools. This custom has been supplemented by putting the children, as far as possible, in private homes where at a very reasonable payment for board they receive good care under normal family conditions. No foster mother is allowed to take too many children and the foster homes are under careful supervision. There has been great improvement in many of the children placed and we consider this an important part of our program. Children who live in very isolated places, particularly high-school children, with no school facilities available, are to advantage placed in foster homes near the schools. This also frequently makes it possible for them to go home for Saturday and Sunday.

Explanation of this arrangement has been made in the justifications for recent years but no change of language has been introduced. A disallowance has recently been made by the Comptroller General to the 1935 accounts of one of our Indian superintendents because of payments for boarding-home care. This disallowance was based upon the fact that the appropriation did not specifically provide for boarding-home care of children attending public schools. The proposed new language provides for care of children attending public schools in order that there may be no further disallowances and that we may continue this necessary program. We are making no point of the financial saving although this is considerable. Language for education of Alabama and Coushatta Indians living in Polk County, Tex., has been eliminated and the $4,500 heretofore authorized has been included in the item for aid to common schools. Payment can be made without the special authorization. These Indians have accepted the Indian Reorganiza

tion Act.

Other minor changes are for the purpose of improving the text of this item.

EXPERIENCE AND TRAINING OF DIRECTOR BEATTY

Mr. JOHNSON. Dr. Beatty, the Director of Indian Education, and Mr. Fickinger, the Assistant Director, are here.

Dr. Beatty, I would suggest that you give for the record your official position, and also state the official positions that you have held in the past, and something of your background. Also, whether or not you are connected with any educational organizations, or other organizations that might be considered unpatriotic, radical, or communistic. I have no desire to embarrass you, but there has been placed in the record a statement that connects your name with radical organizations, and it occurs to me that a brief statement in that connection might be advisable at this time, if you care to make such a statement.

Mr. BEATTY. Surely.

My full name is Willard W. Beatty. My present position is that of Director of Education in the Office of Indian Affairs.

I came to that position from the position of superintendent of schools in the village of Bronxville, N. Y.

In view of your reference to radical tendencies or connections, I might point out to you that that is probably the most valuable square mile of real estate in suburban United States. It is a square mile in area, and its tax value for the year 1929 was $77,000,000, and my superintendency there lasted for a period of 10 years. My resignation to accept my present position in the Indian Office was purely voluntary.

Prior to going to Bronxville, I was assistant superintendent in Winnetka, on the north shore, a suburb of Chicago. For the last 4 years I have been president of the Progressive Education Association. Mr. JOHNSON. That is a patriotic organization and not communistic or radical?

Mr. BEATTY. No, it is not communistic or radical. I think I can indicate its lack of communistic tendencies when I say that during my presidency we have received from the general education board of the Rockefeller Foundation a total of approximately $750,000 for educational research purposes.

I am also a member of the National Education Association, the National Association, or the American Association of School Administrators. They have recently changed their name; both of which are, from the standpoint of their position in the educational world. nothing usually classified as radical in any sense of the word.

I have been associated with the New York State School Superintendents Association, and the New York State Teachers Association, the New York School Masters Club, and I have been a member of the Foreign Policy Association and the Commonwealth Club of California. That is the type of civic and educational organizations that I have been interested in.

Mr. JOHNSON. Then, Doctor, you are not a member of any so-called redical or communistic organization?

Mr. BEATTY. Not unless those organizations and associations that I have mentioned would be so classed.

Mr. JOHNSON. I thought it might be well to clear that matter up. I might say that Dr. Beatty made a trip to Oklahoma not long ago and I had occasion to meet him there. He made many friends in Oklahoma and I was pleased to hear him make many valuable and progressive suggestions, and, personally, I want to commend him for the excellent service he is rendering to the Indians and the Indian Service. He seems to be putting some new, progressive ideas into the Indian educational program.

Now, I would suggest, Dr. Beatty, that you make a general statement with reference to your work in the Indian Service, and what you plan to do, or any other statement that you care to make.

GENERAL STATEMENT ON INDIAN EDUCATIONAL SITUATION

Mr. BEATTY. The position which I found myself in this last year has been that of acquainting myself with existing policies in the office. I would not have accepted the position of director of education if I had not thought myself in sympathy with what my predecessor, Mr. Ryan, had been doing, and with Mr. Collier's policies, as I was familiar with them.

On the other hand, that is somewhat different from knowing the detailed situation as it may exist from one reservation to another in the widely varied problems of the Indian Service.

Certain basic policies of the last 4 or 5 years in the Indian education field I think might be stated as the attempt to place the education of the Indians on a basis as similar to that offered to white children in this country as is feasible under the conditions existing. With the old idea that we could assimilate the Indians more rapidly by taking the children away from home at an early age and keeping them away from their parents for long periods of time, and attempts to inculcate white ways and attitudes into them and then send them back to the reservation to adjust themselves to the conditions which they found there, with no adequate vocational training for making a living on the lands which they owned, with prejudice against them from a racial standpoint existing in many areas among white people where they might seek employment, it seemed to me exceedingly wise that the Indian Office had entered upon a program of construction and of placing Indians in areas where there was a large intermingling of whites, in the public schools of those areas.

SCHOOLS IN CALIFORNIA

I think California may be thought of as an excellent example of what I have in mind there, where the Indians live in small numbers, scattered among whites through the State; and there are few distinc

tively Indian communities. But in the majority of cases they live in white communities and work with the whites and work for whites, and it seems entirely logical that those children should be attending school with the whites, learning to work with and learning to live with their neighbors.

In the same way it seems wise that the Indian children in areas like the Pima Reservation, the San Carlos Reservation, the Apache Reservation, and the Navajo Reservation, attend schools, living at home like our children do, instead of being carried off to boarding schools and supported, fed and clothed by the Government, sometimes when they live just across the street from the school itself.

During the last 6 or 8 years a large number of our boarding schools were closed under this policy, and a large number of day schools were opened in that same period of time.

INCREASE IN NUMBER OF INDIAN CHILDREN IN SCHOOLS

As a matter of actual figures, the total number of youngsters in Indian day schools operated by the Federal Government has increased from 4,532 children in 1928 to 11,822 in the current year, or, rather, last year, 1936, and the number of Indian pupils in public schools has increased from 34,163 in 1928 to 50,328 during the year 1936, and a part of this increase in school attendance in both types of schools has come about from the closing of the boarding schools, although the total number of children originally in those boarding schools is nowhere near the increased number in the day schools and in the public schools.

About 3,100 children were in the boarding schools which were closed. Additional children have come from those areas of the Indian Service where children were not in school 5 or 6 years ago, and there are still other areas in the Indian Service where the children are not yet in school at all.

INSUFFICIENT SCHOOLS

There were never enough boarding schools to care for the Indian children, and even with all of the day school construction which has gone on under our Public Works allotments in the last few years, we have not begun to catch up with the need for schools in the immediate vicinity of the Indian homes.

TRANSPORTATION DIFFICULTIES

In some cases the problem of getting the children into school grows out of the nature of the terrain of the country in which they are living. In the Navajo area our day school of today would have been impossible 6 years ago, because there were no facilities by which those children could have reached school.

The Public Works appropriation made possible the building of roads, and those roads which have been built have made possible the operating of busses. Therefore it has been possible for us to build some of the day schools down there with the appropriate bus routes, and to bring 3,000 or 4,000 children into the schools who could not have otherwise reached school, and we still have a large number of children out of school on the Navajo Reservation, most of them in isolated areas

on the reservation that cannot be reached until roads are extended there.

BOARDING SCHOOLS ON NAVAJO RESERVATION

Our boarding schools on the Navajo Reservation are practically all still in operation, and are housing orphans, children from broken homes, and trachomatist children, and they are housing children who live so far away from these schools that they cannot be brought there on account of the existing condition of the highways.

NUMBER OF INDIAN CHILDREN SUFFERING WITH TRACHOMA

Mr. JOHNSON. Are you familiar with the number of Indian children who are suffering with trachoma, and whether that disease is on the increase or decrease among the Indian population?

Mr. BEATTY. There are indications that it may be on the increase in the Navajo area, and there are likewise indications that in other parts of the country it is definitely on the decrease.

The work of the trachoma school on the Fort Apache Reservation a school established about 3 years ago, has more than cut in half the incidence of trachoma on that reservation, and it is estimated by the Health Division that within another 18 months all but a few very stubborn cases may probably be cleared up.

Now, trachoma, as I understand it, from talking with the Health Division, is much like tuberculosis. It is not a disease that is cured in the way that most diseases are cured. It is a diseases which is arrested. You heal the lesions and, if nothing else occurs to arouse the disease again, or to cause it to flare up, the individual goes through life comfortably and useful to himself and without endangering anyone else. If he is exposed to infection there may be a reawakening of the disease, but the evidence shows that in the time we have operated the Fort Apache School we have discharged as cured over 150 children; that is, they were discharged with the disease arrested.

In the Northwest a year ago we authorized the enrollment of 100 children to the Salem Indian School at Chemawa, and we had that matter called to our attention by the fact that the State laws in Oregon and Washington permit the exclusion of children suffering from trachoma from the public schools.

It was reported to us by Dr. Fullerton, who is director of medical work in that area, that there were between 100 and 130 children tributary to that school that were excluded from the public schools. We have just one Federal school there.

So, we authorized the admission of 100 cases to that school, and the indications are, at the present time, that there are enough children suffering from trachoma in that area to occupy a number of additional places in that school. Dr. Fullerton was in the office recently, and he recommended that we request Congress and the Bureau of the Budget a year from now for at least an additional 100 places in that school for trachomatist children.

We are requesting in this budget, when you get to the school, 50 additional places. We had a maximum enrollment of 300. This request carries it up to 350, and Dr. Fullerton thinks we ought to have at least 100 more, making it 450, in order that all of the children suffer