The Jointure Bandwagon

When the Korean War ended it seemed that Americans had crossed another domestic threshold. It appeared that no one wanted their kids to attend high school in their own hometown. The same post-World War Two, home front introspection that had built GI Tract housing and put women back in the kitchen had reared its head again after Korean Vets returned stateside. Only this time visionary Americans were determined to tear down all those ugly two-story hometown high schools and build “Jointures”. After all, this was a new age. Milton Berle was the new American icon. TV dinners were on their way. MacArthur had "faded away", Truman was out and most of America was already liking Ike. We had helicopters and jets now.

Jointures were super high schools that combined the student populations of several small school districts under one big, single-story roof. They were the academic shopping malls of the future, where grammar school was sold as Junior High School, with high school freshmen being reduced to the same ranks. The new Senior High School became an exclusive hangout for Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors only. There was new tax money for big lawns with lots of athletic fields and a football team backed up by a shiny new band and cheerleaders from several different towns and rural areas. All rolled into one. The wave of the future.

Unfortunately, these new academic visionaries forgot about the fact that hardly anyone could walk to school now. Most would have to be bused and that meant that seventh graders would have to rise and shine before the sun did and wait for school buses in the freezing cold and then travel ten to twenty miles or more to school whereas, before the Korean War, they just got up an hour before school, ate a leisurely and healthy breakfast and walked to school with their siblings and friends. But now they were called students and not pupils. Apparently none of the forward-looking parents and administrators had bothered to look up either word in the dictionary for its true meaning.

Before Jointures, students got to attend classes with kids they grew up with and already knew. Kids they had already made their bones with on the school playground. But no one seemed to care about that back in the 1950s. I’ve often wondered just how many visionaries on the new American school boards also snared the school bus contracts for transporting kids out of their neighborhoods and into the unknown.