High School Principal
HENRY T. HILLSON '30 validates the old spelling rule that says: "The principal is your pal."
For most of the 5000 students at Brooklyn's James Madlson High he has made it a "wiggy" or "in" thing to like school, to want to study, and - for 75% of them to continue their studies beyond high school.
Hillson, who physically resembles another New York school teacher - Irving's legendary Ichabod Crane, strives hard for high academic standards. "But," he says, "my main concern is to prove that a middle-class high school can be successfully integrated."
Until two years ago, when he arrived, Madison was a middle-class white school. Now about 850 students are from minority groups - mostly Negro and Puerto Rican. New York schools are generally crowded and no Madison pupils have been displaced. There is capacity for only 3000, so students are on shifts from 7:45 to 5:30.
The 220 Madison teachers are also on two or three shifts and the average class size is 31. Three full-time and three part-time guidance counselors help students arrange individual programs. Some students are scheduled so they can get home in dangerous areas before dark.
Hillson isn't fazed by these problems because in his 33 years of New York teaching he has experienced similar ones and conquered them. From 1957 to 1962 he headed The Demonstration Guidance Project at Manhattan's George Washington High, called "the most far-reaching attempt in the nation to lift the horizons of youngsters whose drive and ambition have been stifled by the cultural and economic poverty of their neighborhoods."
Despite the project's success, the school board has not continued it for economic reasons, but Hillson has carried on many of the practices at Madison, and schools throughout the city have adopted parts of the program which features smaller classes, double periods of English, and actual, not just theoretical, personal guidance.
He meets with white parent groups and frankly urges them to keep their children at Madison. "Success will be measured," he says, "when the community stops differentiating and all the students, black or white, are just 'youngsters going to Madison.' "
Observers say, "The personal involvement of the top man himself is impressive."
"Normally," Hillson says, "pure police stuff is the kind of thing we give a whirl here first." He deals sympathetically with students' problems, but holds: "A pupil is entitled to every aid and service we can give until he begins to deprive other pupils of their education. At that point he should be removed from school."
His pride in the New York school system, whose students regularly rank at the top in nationwide exams, is justified. He scorns novels and movies that ridicule the system by using extreme examples.
"I was questioned in Europe this summer by people who had an erroneous picture of our schools from these sources," he complains.
"And last year," he boasts, "we had a Madison boy get all A's in the spring term at Dartmouth."
