A fireball among educators is bounding Vierling Kersey, superintendent of Los Angeles' public schools. Superintendent Kersey is now attacking his country's enemies with everything he has, not excepting the kitchen sink. Last week he unlimbered a couple of new weapons and showed the U.S. an amazing example of a school system waging all-out war.
> Mr. Kersey, who bubbles in a hyphenated language of his own, told his school principals that he proposed to make his students "the most health-adequate youth in America." He ordered a physical checkup of Los Angeles' 10,000 high-school seniors, directed that every senior must be in shipshape condition when he graduates in June. Needy students will get free medical and dental treatment. Seniors who qualify will get a certificate of fitness; those who remain unfit through their own fault will be flunked in physical education, may thereby fail to graduate.
> Mr. Kersey then composed a letter to 58,000 elementary school upper-graders, asking them to write him a personal letter "telling me just what it is you are doing or what you are planning to do as your part in this struggle." Each pupil who answers satisfactorily will get a certificate attesting that "he is carrying on a worthy loyal, thrifty and industrious plan to help win complete victory."
Pink-cheeked, hustling Vierling Kersey, 52, runs his principality—a school district almost as big as the State of Rhode Island—with an attention to detail much like that of New York City's fire-chasing Mayor LaGuardia. He dashes from school to school in a big, black car, pops into classrooms, hobnobs with his 250,000 kids. When he became superintendent of schools five years ago (having been a teacher, principal, State superintendent), he found his school system full of Progressive Educators. He not only encouraged their experiments but thought up a few himself. But since the war Superintendent Kersey has restrained his Progressives, demanded more discipline and drill in the three Rs. Says he: "We're not depriving kids of their freedom when we demand that they know how to find ½ of ⅜. . . . A good part of this war depends on competency in computation."
By their official manual Kersey's teachers are instructed to tell their pupils: "Do not believe for a moment that you as an individual will have no influence on the future world order." To encourage individual enterprise of a useful kind, the Superintendent now has his schoolchildren raising their own livestock in their own backyards. Supplied with animals and feed on credit, Los Angeles pupils are now fattening for the market 7,541 rabbits and poultry, 1,000 pigs.
But Superintendent Kersey's most spectacular achievements have been extracurricular. When battle-bound soldiers began to arrive in Los Angeles after Pearl Harbor, Kersey promptly offered to billet them in his schoolhouses. He laid down cots in corridors and gymnasiums of his 30 high schools, called on his cooks and students to man the kitchens, bedded & fed thousands of soldiers, who decamped each morning to let classes go on. Of an evening Superintendent Kersey, persistent in his good works, would have his students entertain the soldiers with dances, operettas.