Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 69, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1899 — About Graduates and Non-Graduates. [ARTICLE]

About Graduates and NonGraduates.

This year’s graduating exercises of the Rensselaer high school will be held Thursday evening, May 26th. The graduating class this year is very good “what there is of it.” But the companion expression of the above, “there is plenty of it such as it is,” does not apply at all. For there is not near enough of it. There are 12 in the class and while that is a pretty fair number it is not half as many as there ought to be. And compared with a graduating class of thirteen in Remington, a town not much over half as populous as Rensselaer, and with a class of 22 or 23 in Monticello, a town not quite as large as ours, the dificiency in number is made more apparent. There is great need for more appreciation of the advantages of high school education in Rensselaer.

Above all, parents need to appreciate it better, and so encourage their children to persevere in the course. Parents who permit their sons to drop out of school when they get to about the 7th or Bth year, because they pick up some little dollar a week job around the stores or other places, are doing the worst thing possible almost for the welfare of those sons.

This tendency to drop out of school is almost universal among the boys who are natives of the town. In this year’s class, for instance there are only four young men, and every one of the four was born and largely brought up in the country. And we think it safe to say that taking the whole list of graduates of our high school for the last fifteen years, not more than one young man out of four in the whole list was a town bred boy. And to a large extent the same tendency to leave school too early prevails among the town bred girls also. The following are the names of the graduating class of this year: Jesse Fox, Leathe Wright, Maude Healey, Merl Gwin, Wayne Parker, Lelia Travis, Mary Kohler, Julia Leopold, Ed Mills, Lena Washburn, Elsie Watson, Ellen Gwin.