audio-visual aids, reading and speech correction, art and music instruction and vocational guidance are presented in P. T. A. meetings for the education of parents. The material well-being of the child is studied through surveys of hot lunch programs, building capacities and health instruction. In all of these organizational activities of parents and teachers one main objective is sought: the well-being of the child. In many ways the influence of parents and other citizens has been felt in the forward movement of El Paso schools.

Because they are constantly growing, schools are never free from "growing pains." The rapidity with which changes from the small self-sufficient and self-centered districts were made into large centralized units, brought an agony of growing pains such as had never before been experienced. In the early days whenever a new center of population sprang up, a new school district was organized and a new schoolhouse built. Materials and labor were cheap and educational demands simple. Today school populations have reached a new high. Old districts have been eradicated and children from the many abandoned districts have been brought into a few focal centers before adequate facilities for housing or instruction could be provided. What is true in El Paso is true throughout the country. One by one the communities are having to meet the situation. A vote, taken in the El Paso Unit on November 28, 1953, for a school building program to provide what was deemed necessary by a survey committee consisting of twenty-eight members selected by representative civic groups who studied the problem for a year, was lost by 175 votes. This cannot be interpreted as a permanent shelving of the issue so long as the problems remain unsettled.

The nation-wide shortage of teachers, the higher educational demands, the improved means of transportation, and the increase in school population have changed the educational outlook all over the land. The problems are challenging and require the best judgments of everyone working together in a spirit of unity with only one objective in mind – how best can adequate school housing and operation be provided at the least cost for the greatest good of the children, in a land whose strength lies in the free public education of its youth?

In a world dominated by fear, propaganda and force the enlightenment of the mind through security, truth and fair play are weapons best provided by the homes, the churches and the schools. Schools are the civic responsibility of everyone who enjoys citizenship. The founding fathers by their immediate establishment of schools were first to recognize this responsibility and down through the years the traditional torch has been passed into our hands. Those who write the El Paso Story for our second century will tell what we do with it.

THE EL PASO PUBLIC LIBRARY. Male inhabitants of El Paso, through the years, have found much cause for mirth over the motto of one female organization: "The World is for Woman Also." But in turn-

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