Dr Rosemary Lucas - My Career in Education

00:02 My name is Sarah Lucas, and today is July 12, 2023. I am in Plymouth Place, room 306. And I am speaking with my husband's aunt, Dr. Rosemary Lucas. And I'm recording this interview in LaGrange, Illinois. And the title of our story today is My Career in Education. So, Rosemary, how did you get interested in education? Where did this all begin?

00:36 My interest in education probably stems back to the days of my very young childhood. And the big thing was to visit school, go to school events and things and see what was going on and watch the programs and all that. And you sort of got a taste of it, and you liked it. Also. Mother was a teacher before she married, and she was somewhat determined, but she was also very influential in getting me interested in teaching because she thought it was a good career for someone, for a woman. And it was a. I can remember her expression was, it'll be a good thing to have in your pocket in the future. You'll be able to fall back on that and do it. Sometimes these days, I kind of question that approach, to have something to fall back on. I think I'd rather like to think that people fell into education because they wanted to be there. But anyway, that's just my opinion. And so all through grade school and high school, you know, whenever the kids would gather and play, we'd play school. And I frequently was the teacher. I don't know. I think once in a while, maybe I even got to be the principal when we were playing.

02:00 How cute.

02:01 Okay. But anyway, and then I earned my degree at the College of St. Francis and Joliet. It's now the University of St. Francis, and at that time, it was a liberal arts college, so you couldn't major in education or anything. You got. Your degree was a Bachelor of Arts degree. But anyway, and since I was working my way along, I was sort of torn between education and going into social work. Oh, really? Because I was interested in both. And so my major field was social sciences and social work. I also had. When you finished, you had to have three. You had to have two majors and a minor, I think something like that, really. And one of my minors was French. Now, thank goodness I never had to earn my living teaching French, because I would have gone hungry. But that's another story. So anyway, I trudged along and did all of the requirements. My degree, and again, a Bachelor of Arts degree. And when I graduated, I had a beautiful new degree and I had a beautiful license to teach in the state of Illinois. Now, that's interesting, because some People were coming and entering into the field and they did not have those licenses that I had. Certificates, they call them. So that was sort of a prize thing.

03:36 Absolutely.

03:37 Anyway, and so upon graduation in May, I started looking for a job, thinking that the world was waiting for me, finding out it was not. And so I applied several places for teaching at the high school level, teaching social studies, because that was my field. And I never did apply for French because I didn't think I could do that. But anyway, nothing was happening. And so about a month or so after graduation, Mother heard of an opening in the local community of Worth. They needed a teacher for first and second grade and she just knew I could do it. And so after a few well placed phone calls, I was called and interviewed by the principal, who incidentally had two years of college, no degree.

04:27 Wow.

04:28 Just remember that. Anyway, and so I was interviewed by the principal who was just glad to get somebody and especially glad to get somebody with my impeccable credentials. So after I was interviewed by the principal, later on, I had to be interviewed by the school board. And I'm not sure, I think there were seven on their men. So I got there to the board and they were all gung ho. This is. You're going to do it. Except for one, one board member, and he kept kicking up. And his problem was that all of my education was in Catholic school and I was Catholic. And he was afraid I was going to teach religion to first and second grade. Well, I didn't. I said no. We finally dismissed it and the rest of the board members were ready to throw him out because they wanted to hire me because they rarely got somebody with a degree. Also young.

05:27 Quick question for you. What year is this?

05:29 What?

05:30 What year is this?

05:30 1949.

05:31 Okay, great.

05:33 And as I say, also young, because in those days in those schools out in the country areas, they got some of the older teachers, you know, who were just filling in their dime and that sort of thing. So to get one who was 21 years old was quite a thing.

05:49 Sure.

05:49 So anyway, after we got through with that hassle, I was employed to teach first and second grade. And there would probably be about 35 students in the room.

06:00 That's a lot.

06:01 Not a problem. I could handle that. I thought I could anyway. And so I very diligently got the classroom ready. I had name tapes, I had all kinds of things. And so the morning, the first day of school, dawn and I went over there, eager to start my career and all that. Well, by 10:00 that morning, there were 58 young children in the room and multiple mothers with babies. And there wasn't room for anybody to sit down. And my beautiful lesson plan was gone completely and all of my little placards and everything that were out, everything was gone. What happened was the baby boomers struck the schools and people hadn't seen them coming. You see this is 1949. And so a lot of these children were born during and after the war. And they were just age to go to school, first grade. So anyway, after that opening exercise, the school board met and decided that maybe they better hire another teacher. And they did. They didn't have a room. They had to put together, I think a room in the basement of the school. And so then I was given the choice of taking either the first or the second grade. And so I chose first. And so that's where I began my career as a first grade teacher. It was interesting. But anyway, so the first two years went along very nicely. The principal was having her problems with the school board and so forth. So by the end of the second year, she left. And they brought a man in because it's good to have a man because he could maintain discipline. So anyway, you think we did more at school than due discipline. But anyway, we started the third year and the district was. The school was growing, growing rapidly. All these new homes were being built and the kids were coming to school. So they hired him to be the principal, but they thought he should have an assistant. And so there I was. I became the assistant principal in my third year of teaching in steps you. And anyway, and that went on for two years. And in the man's second year of being there, things weren't going well for him. He wasn't well. He had some injuries from the war which were impacting him and all that. And so by I think March of that year, it was a weekend because I was away at the time. One of the board members called mother and said they wanted me to be at the schoolhouse on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon at 2:00 because they had to talk to me about this situation that had arisen. And so when I got over there, I learned that the man was not able to return to school and that as of tomorrow morning, I was going to be the principal of the school. So this was into my fourth year of teaching four years.

09:14 Only.

09:19 My mother and the school board member who had called her discussed whether I should do this, because after all, I was young, I was only what, 25 years old. And the big concern was always discipline and how Would I discipline these kids? And I thought, there's more to it than that. Absolutely there is, but anyhow, so then by the next morning, it was 1954, I was the principal. And that just grew from there on and on and in. I think in.

09:53 What was the next kind of milestone for you?

09:56 Well, the milestone, I don't know which. Well, there were a couple of things that I thought we did well and they were sort of milestones because during all of this, now we're building schools. Now what do I know about building anything? So suddenly I have to become an expert on being an engineer and an architect and a lot of things. But I still had something that many of the other teachers in the area and principals, I had a degree and many of them did not. So that made me something. Anyway, as I say, by that time then we started building, we added on, we built new schools. During my tenure there, we had five schools going. We were up to 2,500 students at one time. But things went on and there were some rough times because of course the teachers were not real crazy about accepting a young woman as their principal. That was an interesting thing. We had to work through that quite a bit, but we kept at it. And in my time there, as I say, we built these schools, but our greatest accomplishment was we built a junior high school which was an up to date, you know, not just a recreation room.

11:22 Tim, can you describe like what story comes to mind when you say you had challenges? I'm interested to know kind of what challenges you did face.

11:33 Well, one of them was that this was in the days before there were classes for students with special needs. One of them was that one morning a man from town showed up at the schoolhouse store with his daughter who was, I think she was about 9 or 10, and the girl was blind. And he said, I want her to go to school here today. Now obviously back then we did not have a class for a child like her. So I thought, now what am I going to do about this? So anyway, one of the little old teachers down the hall, I went and talked to her for a couple minutes and she said, oh, she said, she looks like the size of some of my students. Send her to my room and we'll take care of her. Which she did. At least the child got to socialize with other kids her age and she was willing to take it on. Some others would not have touched it with a ten foot ball, but that was one of the challenges. And then there were many more along the way. Sure, there were problems with Some of the children who weren't naughty and you had to work with them. I will say it was a 247 job. It was a high demand job because of the crowding back in the late 50s and early 60s. We had double sessions, and some kids would go from 8 to 12, and some would go from 12 to 4, you know, and all that sort of thing. And when the board decided to do that, one of them came to me and he said, now what hours will you be here? I said, I will be here when the school is open. Which meant that I had quite an extended day, you know. But anyway, that was it. Somewhere along the line, in about probably 55 or so, I did go back to Loyola and got my master's in education, and I got that in 57. It just seemed like a good idea, although nobody was compelling me to do it. But the interesting thing is, through the 40s and 50s, most of the teachers in the schools out in the suburbs did not have a college degree. They were not. They didn't. They hadn't graduated. Little by little, that all changed, and you got different people. But in. I think it was in 68 that we built our junior high school. And we were especially proud of that because of all of the extra amenities that we were able to provide for our children at the time. You know, and then we went on. We had our differences, of course. The teachers union was starting to form, and we hadn't had that before. And the other thing that really grew in the 60s and 70s and all that was the special education program. And I was. And that was a problem because maybe in your school you would have two children who needed two children who were maybe blind. All right, somebody else over here would have one. All right. Obviously, you can't have a class for two and him have a class for one. So we formed a co op, and I was very instrumental in that. And we formed a co op so that we had. So that if you were. If in your district, you could do the blind, you would take everybody from the area.

15:06 Okay.

15:07 And somebody else would do something else. It took a lot of doing to make that work, because it was a cooperative event and it was. We could do it.

15:17 Who did you have to convince to get the co op going? Did you experience any obstacles in getting that going?

15:25 Oh, yeah, we did some of them. We had to convince all our boards that they wanted to do it, because I think in our co op there were about seven school districts, and we had to convince all of them. Because when you started this co Op thing, you had kids who were from poor areas being bussed into areas that were more affluent, because that's where the class was. On the other hand, you had kids from the more affluent areas might be being bussed into the poorer areas. So you had a little of that kind of thing to work out. And it took a lot of doing, too, because some parents didn't want their children sent there. And this sort of thing. That one was hard. That was hard. But then the law came along. When Public Law 94,142 was formed, we didn't have much choice. You had to pull it together because you were obliged to provide for these children through age 22. That was a big challenge that I thought we had to meet, and I think we met it well. And our cooperative that we formed still exists today.

16:31 Wow.

16:32 Because it worked for us. The other thing, the other challenge that I met, it was into the 70s. Up to that time, school districts out in the suburbs would just maybe sit down with a teacher committee and work out the schedule for next year, the pay schedule, and that was that. But Starting in the 70s, Chicago had always been bargaining, but it crept out into the suburbs. And so about that time, they started bargaining hot and heavy in the suburban school districts. The larger ones, ours didn't get into it until. I don't remember the exact date, but I know that I worked hard with my board and with the teacher group to hammer out a good agreement that we could live with and that they weren't taking more than they should get, et cetera, et cetera. That was a tough assignment. And around in there somewhere. I started my doctorate at Loyola, which I finally earned in 1980, and I did my research for my doctorate on development of collective bargaining agreement with teachers. Because it was coming prior to that time, the suburban districts just said, oh, we don't have to be bothered with that sort of thing. That's just for Chicago and the big places. Well, suddenly it was everybody. And collective bargaining, by the way, is required. You couldn't ignore it. Teachers wanted it, you gave it to them. You had to work on it.

18:10 I'm going to ask you a couple of broad questions, but I think they're good ones. How did being in education, how did it change you? How did it change you? Change the way you look at yourself, the world, etc.

18:27 I don't know how it made me change how I look at myself, but I know being in education made you develop an appreciation for having an education as opposed to back in the olden days. You got out you had the old reading, writing and arithmetic approach, and that doesn't work. And so that was one thing that I got out of it. And of course, in my case, we had always been in education because Mother made sure of that. She was a teacher. And in fact, like, when I finished college, most girls hadn't gone past high school, you know, because that was what it was in those days.

19:08 But here's another question I have for you. What made you continue setting the bar for yourself higher and higher? What was it that made you.

19:17 Well, I just. First of all, I should back up a little bit. You have to realize that it was. I was typically the only woman who.

19:27 Held Rosemary's lunch arrived, so we took a quick break. So to continue, you were saying, what motivated you to keep setting the bar higher and higher for yourself? That's what I want to know.

19:41 Well, first of all, I had to set the bar because I was competing. And it was not unusual for me to be the only woman in a group of administrators. And I was competing with some who had probably better, who probably had more education than I did or whatever. But the competition was out there, and I thought, if I'm going to do a good job at this, I have to keep up with my training. And that was what it was about. It was interesting because typically the men who would hold the same position did not get paid. They got paid more than I did. Yeah, I was one of the lower paid. In fact, one of the men told me one time, he said, you make us look bad because you take a lower pay and you do a better job. It was quite a compliment. But anyway, it was a highly competitive field, and when you got there and somebody had sprouts, something new, you had to quickly go and make sure that you were up to date on it all that, you know.

20:55 But anyway, my last question for you is, when do you think about the kids that you taught? Do they ever come to mind?

21:03 Oh, yeah, I think about them a lot. Well, the ones I taught, because don't forget, I only taught for a couple years. Yeah, yeah, I think about them a lot because they were a group of rascals if ever there was one. No, I think about those kids a lot. And then I think a lot about the kids that we have gone, that have gone through the school system where I was superintendent. And I think once, I hope once in a while that I should say, I think once in a while about how they're doing now. And, you know, and some of them stand out maybe because they had serious problems, and we tried to work through them, you know, that sort of thing. Oh, yeah.

21:40 I know from conversations with you that whenever I talk with you about education, you're always concerned about the kid that isn't doing well. I noticed that about you. It's a really wonderful quality.

21:53 Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you have to. You can't just push them along from grade to grade. You know, some people do that, but you can't do that.

22:01 So you're looking out for the underdog. You're looking out for the underdog.

22:05 Well, that's your job. That's your job. But it was a highly competitive business, you know, But I never did. I have job security. I guess I did. I don't know.

22:19 Rosemary, thank you very much.

22:21 I don't know how you're gonna put all together.

22:23 You know, it's been put together by you, so thank you.

22:26 But I. I started in 1949, and I retired in 1993.

22:36 Wow.

22:36 And it was in the spring when it happened that the principal had to leave and they wanted me to take the spot. A board member said, well, you know, we want you to do it, and will you just help us out for a little while? And so anyway, so 40 years later, I said, the little while is up.