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Partial Transcript: I'm sitting down today in Rio Vista, California, with Sharon Fogelson, and today we'll be talking about her time as Director of the Childcare Development Center.
Keywords: 1943; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Native Americans; Oakland, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; divorce; furniture store; grandparents; horses; moving; parents; visiting family
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you tell me about the house that you grew up in in Oakland, perhaps? Was there a place that you moved, a particular place that you moved when you were in Oakland?
Keywords: Oakland, California; baking; canadian jew; family; growing up; home religious service; jewish; lack of diversity; marital separation; paying as a child; religion; religious holidays; russian jew; social life in Oakland; synagogue
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you maybe talk a little bit about your mother's personality? What was she like as a person?
Keywords: dancing; divorce; dresses; garage sales; mother's sense of humor; nightlife in the bay area; nursery rhymes; reading; reading to children; social life
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: What about starting at school as a young girl in Oakland? Where did you attend your first school?
Keywords: Manzanita Elementary School; elementary school; kindergarten; parents; protective parents; reading; school activities; school functions
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you talk, then, about middle school? What middle school or junior high did you attend?
Keywords: Hamilton Junior High School; college prep; fight; homework; judaism; middle school; racial descrimination; racial slurs
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can I ask about racial segregation in those days? Were the Oakland high schools still segregated in terms of race?
Keywords: academic achievement; brown v. board of education; criteria for academic placement; education tracks; educational tracks; ethnic diversity; good memory; high school; racial segregation; racism; segregation; speech therapist; veterinarian
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Yes. I graduated from college. I put myself through school, so it took me four and a half years to get my BA.
Keywords: Richmond Unified School District; San Francisco State College; abuse marks; bronchitis; chicken pox; child abuse; childrens center; childrens health; entering teaching program; finishing college; job interview; preschool; preschool teacher; special education; speech; speech therapy; state preschool teacher; teaching credentials; teaching permit requirements; transcripts
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you explain the difference for me between, in those days, the state teacher's credential and the children's center permit that allowed you to work in the child development center for that first year?
Keywords: child development; children's center permit; closing teacher responsibilities; education; job requirements; opening teacher responsibilities; site director; state school program requirements; teaching credential; teaching permit
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: What was your familiarity with the city of Richmond before arriving to work there?
Keywords: BART; Bay Area; Bay Area Transportation Study Commission; Marin County; North Richmond; public transportation; transportation study
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Let's talk about, then, along those same lines, when you're the opening teacher and kids are coming in and you're inspecting them health-wise; but then you're also sort of getting some opportunity, maybe, to talk to a parent about a situation at home or things of that nature. Can you maybe talk about that experience and what sorts of things you were learning about the home life of some of these kids?
Keywords: Pullman Children's Center; casual relationships with parents; child development; community diversity; diversification of community; diversity; growth of classes; health inspection; interacting with student parents; parents; small talk; student home life; teaching; teaching responsibilities; working parents
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you talk about some of the challenges that the teachers were facing when you first arrived? What were some of their biggest challenges?
Keywords: ESL; English as a second language; English learners; HUD housing; Indian; Spanish; african american; changing demographics; child development; cultural identity; diverse learning; foreign born students; full-immersion program; hispanic; multicultural education; social-emotional problems; southeast asians; special education; teaching
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you talk about fire drills and possibly a slide escape?
Keywords: WWII construction; deserted factory fire; emergency preparedness; fire drills; fire escape; fires; school evacuation; slide escape; tire factory
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: I'm wondering if you can talk for me, for a moment, about did some of the older teachers there have - was there an institutional memory of the World War II days in the child development center? And if so, what did people talk about when they talked about World War II?
Keywords: Richmond, California; camaraderie between teachers; childhood development; children's centers; community support; curriculum development; education; education standards; funerals; history of children's centers during WWII; memories of WWII; public housing; social skills; state education funding; state funding; student cooking; support system; trying new foods; war time education; women workers
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Do you think the teachers generally shared the same vision for the school and for education? Or was there ever a tension there, where different teachers might have a different soft of idea of how to go about something?
Keywords: ammunity art; art; artistic expression; child development; class garden; committes; community; creative play; creativity; curriculum; curriculum development; education; educational vision; expression; garden; innovation; koolaid; language arts; learning through doing; social interaction; the science committee
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: We talked a little bit about in the 1960s, some of the riots in Richmond, and I'm wondering if maybe you could talk about that and how that affected your children's lives.
Keywords: Pullman Children's Center; community; community tension; riots; riots in Richmond; single family homes; tension; work commute
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: What about music? Can you talk about music? Was that a component of the curriculum?
Keywords: classroom; music class; music curriculum; musical instruments; phonograph; rainy day music; rainy days; sing a longs
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you talk for a moment -- there's two questions. Well, first, let's talk about unionization. So I understand that the school unionized in around 1964.
Keywords: 1964; State Department of Education; achievement gap; achievement programs; california education code; career planning; children's centers; curriculum; curriculum development; federal funding; gender discrimination; high quality preschool programs; high scope; learning concepts; montessori; research in preschool program outcomes; salary and benefits; social skills; standardized testing; student assessment; testing; unionization
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: You also said something that I thought was very interesting, was that the scale, the pay scale, was incentivized based on the time that you had been at the school, but then also 110:00your educational background and credentials and the number of relevant units that you had. That created an incentive for you to go back to school.
Keywords: career growth; child development programs; cognative development; continuing education; incentives; incentives for teachers; incentivizing teachers; professional development; public school teachers; salaries; school budget; strengthening curriculum
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: Can you talk about your rise up to the point of being head teacher?
Keywords: 1990s; Maritime; Peres Children's Center; Pullman; State Preschool Program; becoming head teacher; budget monitoring; chapter 2 schools; early childhood education; educational leadership; leadership; school plans; separation of church and state; teacher encouragement; title 1 schools
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
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Partial Transcript: There's been added attention back on these programs stemming back to World War II and looking at how innovative these programs were, and continued to be for many years after the war. You'd also mentioned how ahead of their time these programs were. I'm wondering now, do you think they're finally getting the recognition they're deserving? Or is it still something that's not recognized to the extent that it needs to be?
Keywords: child development; early childhood development; early childhood education; early childhood programs; education; forming minds; importance of collaboration; innovation in education; innovative education; opportunities to learn; progression; reflection on career
Subjects: Community and Identity; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front
REDMAN: Today is April 4, is that correct? April 4, 2012.
FOGELSON: That's correct.
REDMAN: I'm sitting down today in Rio Vista, California, with Sharon Fogelson,
and today we'll be talking about her time as Director of the Childcare Development Center. But before we dive into that, I'd like to begin with a very simple question. If you could just state your name, for the record, and then spell it out, that would be a great place to start.FOGELSON: Okay. My name is Sharon Fogelson, S-H-A-R-O-N, F-like
Frank-O-G-E-L-S-O-N. And I was a head teacher, not a director. The Director was over all of the centers. They now call the head teachers Position Site Directors. 00:01:00REDMAN: Will you tell me where you were born?
FOGELSON: I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah.
REDMAN: And when were you born?
FOGELSON: 1943.
REDMAN: Can you tell me a little bit about your parents? What brought them to
Salt Lake City, Utah?FOGELSON: Well, actually, my mother was born in Calgary, Alberta Canada. And my
grandmother's siblings, they sort of -- if the family moved, everyone moved. And so my grandmother was married in Canada; she was born in London. And my grandfather, maternal grandfather, and my great-uncle used to buy horses from the Indians and break them in their backyard and then resell them to people. So my mother came to Salt Lake when her family relocated. And she met my father, 00:02:00actually on her lunch break in a furniture store. And they were married and had two children. My brother's five years younger than I am. Then when I was about eight and my brother was three, my parents separated and later divorced. So they moved to California when I was five months old. They soon purchased a house in Oakland. So that's how we came to California. My father had a business, and we stayed in California.REDMAN: So while your parents were separated, you would still see them
occasionally, both, in California? You were living with your mother?FOGELSON: Yes. I lived with my mother and my grandmother, and my father lived
different places, but my brother and I always saw him. We usually flew. He lived 00:03:00for a long time in Louisville, Kentucky, and so we would fly back there during the summer and spend six weeks with him.REDMAN: What do you recall? Do you recall Salt Lake City as a youngster?
FOGELSON: No.
REDMAN: Not very much so?
FOGELSON: Because I was five months old when I left.
REDMAN: So your earliest memories, then, are in Oakland.
FOGELSON: Correct.
REDMAN: Can you tell me about the house that you grew up in in Oakland, perhaps?
Was there a place that you moved, a particular place that you moved when you were in Oakland?FOGELSON: Yes, we lived off of Fruitvale Avenue, on a street called Hyde,
H-Y-D-E. We lived in a Spanish-style house, with the same kind of roof that this house has, and I lived there even part of the time when I was going to college. My brother and I were raised in that house. One of the things about the 00:04:00neighborhood where I grew up is that all different ages of children lived on our street, but everybody socially interacted, and we played all kinds of games together. So besides having your own personal friends, all the kids on the street during the summer and after dinner would come outside, and we would play red-light-green-light, dodge ball, touch football, anything you can imagine.REDMAN: I'm going to adjust my camera setting here, but I do have a follow-up
question to that.FOGELSON: Okay.
REDMAN: So let me pause this. [audio file stops & restarts] When we left off, we
were talking about the different children growing up in the neighborhood and some of the games that you would play together. Did you get a sense of the kids -- would they interact in the neighborhood, despite racial differences or 00:05:00religious differences that their parents may have? Was there sort of an interaction beyond that? Or were there certain distinctions drawn, even at that young age, about things like racial background or religious background?FOGELSON: Most of the children that lived in my neighborhood were Caucasian. And
there were some Asian families. But other than that, there wasn't much diversification in the different ethnic backgrounds of the children in the neighborhood.REDMAN: Can you talk about your parents? What was their religious and ethnic
background, if you don't mind sharing?FOGELSON: Right. My father was a Russian Jew and my mother was a Canadian Jew.
And I'm Jewish, so that's how I was raised.REDMAN: So would you go to synagogue on the weekends in Oakland?
FOGELSON: Not on the weekends, but on all the high holidays, yes. Yes.
00:06:00REDMAN: Growing up, was that a regular part of your upbringing? Or did you think
of it as sort of a holiday event?FOGELSON: I didn't think of it as a holiday event, but my parents were separated
when I was very young. My grandmother was raised Orthodox, and so was my mother. And so culturally, usually a male conducts even the home services. It's changed now, but in those days, that's how it was. So we celebrated all the holidays, and our family used to come to my home because my grandmother was an extraordinary cook. I think they just came sometimes because they wanted to see us and they liked to eat, rather than the spiritual part of any of the holidays.REDMAN: Can you talk about eating a little more in your family, what cooking was
00:07:00like and everyday life sort of growing up? We talked a little bit about on a holiday, but was she a good cook otherwise?FOGELSON: My grandmother cooked. My mother didn't cook because she said that
she'd always be compared to her mother, and she could never live up to the standard. My mother modeled, and so my grandmother cooked American food and all the Jewish ethnic foods. She baked every day. When my brother and I came home from school, you opened the front door and you could just smell the aroma of whatever she had baked. She was English, so she would always ask us if we wanted a cup of tea and if we wanted whatever treats she'd made. We just used to have extraordinary dinners, but we never knew how fortunate we were until we were older, because we didn't totally comprehend what a talented cook she was. 00:08:00REDMAN: Can you maybe talk a little bit about your mother's personality? What
was she like as a person?FOGELSON: Prior to being divorced, my mother was probably a pretty reserved
person. When she got divorced from my father, once she kind of healed from the divorce, she decided to become a blonde. I have a picture of her over on the sofa. She was a brunette; her hair was darker than yours. When she became a blonde, I don't know what happened to her personality, but you know how they tease women, say, "Once you become a blonde, your whole life changes." She became very social and she loved to dance. So she used to go to the public dances. They had Sweet's Ballroom in Oakland and the Ali Baba; and then in San Francisco, there was the El Patio. My mother just loved to go dancing. So she 00:09:00would go at least two nights, three nights a week. We always used to tease her because she had some really interesting dresses that she would wear, and my grandmother and I would always tease her. We had a two-storey house, so we'd say, "Oh, I can't wait till Lily comes down the steps so we can see which one of her ball gowns she has on tonight." My grandmother always kidded her and said, "Whatever you buy without my presence is always really gaudy, and whatever you buy with my presence is always very tasteful."REDMAN: It seems like there was a pretty light-hearted teasing going on towards
your mom going out and meeting people.FOGELSON: Oh, yeah. Yeah. My mother had an incredible sense of humor and she
loved to have a good time, she loved to travel, she loved parties. And she read probably five books a week.REDMAN: So she was pretty insatiable, in terms of her reading.
00:10:00FOGELSON: Yes. She'd ask me, "If you go to a garage sale or a flea market," --
because she'd already read almost every book in the library -- "just buy whatever they have. Just buy a box full of books for me."REDMAN: Did she read to you when you were young?
FOGELSON: Absolutely every night. She used to tell me when I was a child that I
had memorized all the stories, and sometimes she was tired so she would skip a line or a paragraph and I would stop her and say, "No, you forgot the part about -- ." So I knew every story by heart. Also she taught us all the nursery rhymes.REDMAN: Similarly, with your grandmother in the house, would she take care of
you and your brother quite a bit?FOGELSON: Yes, she would take care of us sometimes, but she wasn't involved in
those kinds of activities.REDMAN: What about starting at school as a young girl in Oakland? Where did you
00:11:00attend your first school?FOGELSON: Manzanita Elementary School. And I remember the first day just like it
was yesterday, because my brother was just born. So my mother hired a lady to stay in the house with her for a couple of weeks, to help her, and my father took me to kindergarten the first day. And he never left. He stood outside and looked through the window the whole time. I was absolutely mortified. I was so embarrassed. So the teacher went out once and reassured him. "Mr. Fogelson, your daughter's fine. She's not even crying. You can go home." "No, that's okay, I'll wait." So then when it was time to go home, I said to him, "Daddy, please don't do this again because it's so embarrassing for me." I said, "No one else's 00:12:00parents stayed, and I don't want you to do that again." My father was not the type of person that you would ever guess would do that.REDMAN: So was he a little protective of his little girl?
FOGELSON: I just think I was his first child and I think he was worried that I
was going to be scared or I was going to cry. I was having a wonderful time and I just wanted him to leave.REDMAN: So what did you think of school, following that? It sounds like you
enjoyed your first day. Did that sort of enthusiasm persist?FOGELSON: I loved school. I absolutely loved it. I had a wonderful kindergarten
teacher. It's interesting when I think back about it, because the kind of kindergarten class that I went to was very similar to the child development 00:13:00centers, the children's centers in Richmond, and I'm sure, those in my own community, because some of the classroom parts were set up exactly the same way. There was -- we called it a house area, that had furniture and children could role play and there were dolls. Then we had an art area, where you could easel paint, and a block area with the same kinds of blocks; we had big ones and small ones, that you could build things. Our teacher read lots of stories to us and taught the nursery rhymes; and you had to learn how to share and to take turns and to follow directions; and then you had time outside, where you could play and socialize. So it's interesting, when I think back, how similar my kindergarten class was to what the preschool was where I worked. 00:14:00REDMAN: So it sounds as though a lot of the developments that had taken place
probably in the thirties and forties, in terms of educational theory, about the incorporation of art and play and some of those sorts of ideas, were pretty well established by the late 1940s, early 1950s, when you started school. But let's talk, then, about a few years later, getting into the grade levels. Did you have particular subjects that stood out for you as favorites?FOGELSON: Yes. One of them was reading, because I always read several grade
levels ahead of my class; usually four grade levels. There were three students, and I can still remember a lady used to come and test us all the time. She was 00:15:00testing to see what grade level we were able to read at. So I knew that that was a skill that I had that was more advanced than other children. Also I liked art very much. I thought it was really fun. Any school function that ever went on in elementary school, I participated in. I can still remember my mother saying, "I have to go to the Christmas pageant again? Why do you keep volunteering?" And I said, "Well, even though it's not my religion, what we do is fun." We might be candy canes and dance. It didn't have a direct connection to a religion. So I really liked that and I thought it was fun.REDMAN: Can you talk, then, about middle school? What middle school or junior
high did you attend?FOGELSON: I went to Hamilton Junior High School in Oakland. I loved school all
00:16:00the way through.REDMAN: All the way through.
FOGELSON: Yes. Middle school, we had pretty rigorous classes. In those days,
they used to put you in tracks. If you were in a college prep track, they had really high standards. It wasn't easy, it was tough. It's very different than elementary school, because they treat you more like you're a mature person than you're a child, and you have a lot more responsibilities and a lot more homework, especially in high school.REDMAN: With your family situation at home, did you notice any sort of attitude
or stigma applied to your family because of the divorce? Or were kids -- did they pretty much roll with that? Or did they not think of it as being a 00:17:00particularly big thing in those days?FOGELSON: Well, no one ever said anything negative to me because my parents were
divorced. Their parents may have had their own thoughts about it, but it never was imposed upon my relationship with my friends.REDMAN: How about in terms of religious background? Did other students comment
on your religion at all, growing up? Was that ever a topic of discussion?FOGELSON: Actually, only once. And it was a very ugly situation. I went to visit
a friend of mine, and we had gone all through school together. Her oldest brother and two boys that lived closer to me, they were waiting for me on the corner when I left her house. When I got down to the corner, the three of them 00:18:00started calling me names, like "you dirty Jew, you're a Kike." The one who said it the most was the one that was in classes with me. His name was George. I told him if he said it to me again, that he's going to wish he never said it. And he kept it up, and so I grabbed him and threw him on the grass, and I beat the crap out of him. Later that afternoon, his mother called my mother and said, "My son came home and said your daughter beat him up." So my mother said, "Yes, she did." She said, "Do you know why?" She said, "Yes, I do," and she proceeded to tell her. She said, "I am so sorry. I will take care of my boys and they will not do that again."REDMAN: That must've been a very interesting, eye-opening experience for you, as
00:19:00a young girl.FOGELSON: I was just shocked that somebody would say those things to me. My
attitude was, "They won't say them again; I will make sure that doesn't happen again." But that's how I reacted to it. I was just infuriated. And I'd known these kids since we were really young.REDMAN: So it was surprising, in that sense.
FOGELSON: It was pretty surprising, yes, because I don't know what prompted them
that particular day to do this. Part of it was all three of them were together, so they probably felt as a group, they had more strength or power. I don't think they ever dreamt that I would react the way I did, because they didn't ever do it again.REDMAN: That's a pretty funny story. Can I ask about racial segregation in those
00:20:00days? Were the Oakland high schools still segregated in terms of race?FOGELSON: Well, they weren't segregated in terms of race, but what they did was
they put you in tracks. So by doing that, you actually were segregating, because most of the students that were in a D track or a C track were African American or Hispanic, primarily. Most of the Asian students achieved well, and so they were in the A or B track. Once I accidentally was put in the wrong track, and I can remember that, also just like it happened yesterday. In fact, it was American history, and I was put in the D track. I never saw any of the kids in 00:21:00my class before, so I knew something was wrong. So my teacher said that you had to take notes and that it was a requirement; it wasn't a suggestion. So he talked like a record that was on the wrong speed, so slowly. So I thought, I don't need to take notes, I can remember everything he said. So when the class was over, before everybody left the room, he said, "Sharon, you didn't take notes." I said, "Well, I really don't need to. I can remember everything you said." He laughed and said, "Oh, yes, I'm sure you can. Would you like to repeat everything I said?" So I repeated his whole lecture in about two minutes, and all the kids just cracked up. So then he must've gone and spoken to my counselor 00:22:00and said. "She's in the wrong track; would you please move her?" But obviously, kids were segregated, but that was the criteria that they used to do it.REDMAN: I have two questions here. One is if, as a young person in those days,
if you were starting to hear stories about things that were going on in high schools, say in Little Rock, Arkansas, or the decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Those must've been pretty big events, but I wonder if in California those were things that were on the radar, so to speak, for a young woman of your age.FOGELSON: Well, when they became on the radar for me was in college, because a
00:23:00lot of -- my friends were very diverse ethnically. Lots of them were picketing in San Francisco, at the auto dealerships. Just like mortgage companies, they charged different interest rates for lots of minority people's loans because -- it's actually a form of racism. So this was going on a lot, and there were rallies and speakers who came and addressed it. So they asked me if I wanted to go picket. They'd already gone once, and some of them got cracked over the heads with batons and spent the night in jail. I said, "I'll be really honest with you. I don't have the courage to put myself in a position where somebody could crack my head open." And I said, "I would have to find a different way to express my feelings about this, but I don't want to subject myself to violence. 00:24:00And," I said, "I don't want to have a criminal record."REDMAN: So in those days, as you started to get towards the end of high school,
did you start to have a thought about what you wanted to do as you got older, for a career, for work?FOGELSON: Well, actually, what I really wanted to be was a veterinarian, but
science was not one of my greatest strengths. So I decided to be a speech therapist. It's a good thing I didn't because you'd have all these children with little nasal voices running around the Bay Area. But anyway, the way I got my job was really very unusual.REDMAN: Can you talk about that?
FOGELSON: Yes. I graduated from college. I put myself through school, so it took
me four and a half years to get my BA. I majored in speech, and I minored in 00:25:00special education.REDMAN: And where was this that you attended?
FOGELSON: San Francisco State College. So I was really fatigued after that long,
working and going to school full time. So I told my mother that I wanted to take off a year and get a teaching credential and maybe just take a class or two at night, and then go back for a year and get my credential. So my mother said that was fine, and I said I wanted to work for a year. So one day my mother came home and said, "I have a surprise for you." I said, "What?" and she said, "Well, every Saturday when I go to the beauty shop, I sit next to a lady named Wilma Winters, who is an administrator in Richmond Unified School District. So I always talk about you, and I told her you wanted to be a speech therapist and 00:26:00now you would like to work for one year. So she said, "On Monday morning you meet her at the personnel office in the school district, and you're going to be interviewed to be a state preschool teacher." I said, "What?" My mother said, "Well, you said you wanted a job, so I found you a job."So I went, and I didn't have any idea what kinds of questions they would ask me.
And they told me to bring my transcripts. So I brought my transcripts and my degree, and I was interviewed by Mr. Burns. He said that in order to teach in the State Preschool Program, you actually have to hold a California teaching credential. "And since you don't have one, you wouldn't be qualified for that job. But," he said, "there's another job open in the children's centers. And," he said, "You have enough early childhood units that I think you're eligible to 00:27:00get a child development permit, and that would enable you to teach there. So would you go with Mrs. Winters over to their office, and Mary Hall will interview you." So I said sure. So we went over there, and Mrs. Winters took me inside and introduced me to Mary Hall, and then we went and sat in the staff room, and she interviewed me. Every question she asked me, she answered.REDMAN: [laughs] So she'd ask you a question and then answer herself.
FOGELSON: She'd say, "You love children, don't you? Oh, I know you love them."
It didn't matter what the question was. I was just bewildered, and I just thought it was the strangest interview. So after about twenty minutes, she showed me all around the school. These were children from two through five. Then across the street, there were children six through twelve, in the extended day program. So she walked me to the door, and so I said to her, "Well, you haven't 00:28:00given any indication whether or not you're interested in hiring me." "Oh, yes! I want to hire you. Go back down to personnel and fill out the papers." So I started to work in the children's centers, and so I came home and my mother said, "Well, how much money are you going to make?" So I told her and she said, "Oh, my God, another terrible mistake," she said. "You're hardly making anything and you already graduated from college." I said, "That's okay; it'll be fun for a year." Well, the first year I was there, I just loved it. I just thought it was like somebody opened a door for me that I would never have known about had my mother not graciously talked to this lady and convinced her I'd be a wonderful employee.So I was hired, and I think I worked -- first I was the closing teacher, and I
00:29:00worked from 10:00 to 6:00. Then they made me the opening teacher. The opening teacher, you came in with three other people and you opened the building, because we were open from 6:00 to 6:00. So I had to inspect every child when he/she came in. I sat in a child-sized chair and they sat one, and used a gooseneck lamp. So I checked them to make sure that they didn't have anything communicable like chicken pox, that they didn't have any marks on them like they were being abused, that they didn't have pink-eye, that you looked down their throat to make sure their tonsils were not infected and swollen. Sometimes parents brought their children to school when they weren't well. And I understand why they did it, because lots of them were single parents and they had no one to leave them with. So they were hoping that I wouldn't notice, but I 00:30:00usually noticed. I would have to take the child's temperature, and if they had a fever, they had to stay home until they were free of fever for twenty-four hours or -- if they were nauseous -- until they stopped vomiting for twenty-four hours. So I learned a lot about children's health doing that job.Also it was a way to observe if you thought a child might be being abused.
Sometimes I would ask the parent, did you know that your child had bruises on their upper arm? Or whatever I observed. So it might give me an opportunity to find out. Some parents were very honest and would tell you, "My child was 00:31:00jumping on the bed last night, and her father spanked her with a belt." Other parents, "Oh, I didn't know it was there." Then some people would get really angry because they surmised that we were required reporters.REDMAN: Can you explain the difference for me between, in those days, the state
teacher's credential and the children's center permit that allowed you to work in the child development center for that first year? Sort of the differences between those requirements.FOGELSON: Yeah, I can tell you what they were when I left the program and retired.
REDMAN: Sure. And that was about what year?
FOGELSON: Well, I retired in 2003, but I left the children's centers -- see, I
worked there twenty-five years.REDMAN: So it says here between 1966 and 1991.
00:32:00FOGELSON: Yeah, I think I changed jobs in '91. I worked in the children's center
for twenty-five years, and then I went to work for the state preschool. So the difference basically is in the State Preschool Program -- and it could've changed now because I've been almost nine years -- you had to have a BA or a BS and a teaching credential, like an elementary teaching credential, a multiple-subject teaching credential, an early childhood teaching credential, whatever, because you worked the same workday and work year as an elementary teacher. Also because it was in the guidelines that if you located a state preschool on an elementary campus, the principal was technically like the site director. So in order to be treated by the district, equivalent to a 00:33:00kindergarten teacher, say for example, you had to have the credential and you were paid from District's Teacher's salary schedule.But a children's center permit is different. In the children's center, when I
worked there, there were a lot of women who -- I'm going to say the majority of women had a children's center permit, rather than a teaching credential; but there were several who had teaching credentials. The difference is that to get a children's center permit, there's all different requirements and a different level of teachers. In the children's center, I don't believe they hired anybody that didn't have at least an AA, and then later it became a BA. You had to have, I believe, at least twelve units in early childhood education, in order to be 00:34:00eligible to receive the permit. The permit had to be renewed, just like a teaching credential does. So that's what I was able to obtain, because I had enough of the early childhood courses. So you can't teach elementary school with a children's center permit.REDMAN: So then later on, you returned. In 1966, you went back to school to get
a second major? Is that correct?FOGELSON: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
REDMAN: We'll get back to that in a moment, but I'd like to get some just simple
definitions here, for some things that you'd mentioned. Can you tell me about the responsibilities of the closing teacher? What would the closing teacher have done at the child development center?FOGELSON: Well, the closing teacher -- if someone didn't come to pick up a
child, you couldn't leave until it was resolved. There are all different kinds 00:35:00of circumstances.REDMAN: How many students were at the school?
FOGELSON: Probably two hundred.
REDMAN: So in a day, there might be a couple of students --
FOGELSON: Almost every day.
REDMAN: Almost every day there would be a handful. And repeat situations or -- ?
FOGELSON: Sometimes they were one-time-onlys, and then there were some people
who did it habitually. It could be because they asked their aunt to pick them up and they forgot. I've had people that really had a flat tire, and by the time Triple-A came -- we didn't have cell phones then, so they couldn't just call you and say, "I'm stranded on Interstate 80; I'll be there in ten minutes."REDMAN: So the closing teacher had to wait.
FOGELSON: Yes. Well, you call all the people on the emergency card, because they
were all authorized to pick up the child. So you could call all of those people 00:36:00and say, "Mrs. So-and-so didn't come today to pick her child up; can you help us out?" Because most of the time they lived in a close vicinity to the school, so it wasn't really hard. Then the other thing you had to do was you had to lock up the building and turn on the alarm.REDMAN: So let's talk about the opening teacher.
FOGELSON: The opening teacher, I think, had more responsibilities, because you
were like the teacher in charge, until the head teacher arrived. So if there were any serious problems, people would come to the opening teacher. You had to inspect the building in the morning, before you unlocked the doors to the 00:37:00public. So myself and the receptionist did it, and then a group aide came in and opened one of the classrooms, and the cook went in and started making breakfast. So we would have to walk through the building, and we went to every classroom, to make sure that no one had broken in the building at night, that none of the windows were broken, that everything was left the way it was the night before.We did have one incident happen that scared both of us half to death. We got to
about the fourth room down, and a man was in the room. When he saw us, he just looked and he ran out the back door. We started screaming. The other two women came running from the other end of the school. We went out the front door and we all jumped into -- Virginia was the receptionist. We all jumped into her 00:38:00vehicle. But one lady was far behind and she's yelling, "Wait for me. Don't leave me here." So we went around the corner, and there was a little grocery store, and there was a public phone. So we called the police, and they came. He was long gone by then. I don't really think he had done anything or taken -- he was probably only in there a short time, because there really wasn't anything gone. But you never knew what was going to happen. So after that incident, the director hired a man to open with us. He wasn't any more protection than a fly on the wall. He'd have probably run out the door with us, too, if it happened. But people came in and they could see visually that they'd taken some steps to try to protect us.REDMAN: What was your familiarity with the city of Richmond before arriving to
00:39:00work there? Were you familiar with the city?FOGELSON: It's interesting you ask that, because I was, in a way. Only because I
had a job, prior to working in the children's center, for nine months. It was called the Bay Area Transportation Study Commission. The state was conducting a research study in the nine counties of the Bay Area, because they were planning BART then. So we would be given -- at random, a computer would randomly select people's names and addresses, and we would go to the house and explain why we were there, and leave them a card to fill out for a week. They had numbers they used to indicate, if they drove to the destination, if they took a bus, if they walked, if they rode a bicycle, a motorcycle, a bus, whatever. So we had people 00:40:00who would just refuse to do it. They'd say, "I don't want to do it; I don't want to be bothered."So I was asked to be put on the refusal squad, because I was very persuasive, in
talking people into doing it. I had a really low incidence of refusals. So I would go to peoples' homes and most of the time, they sent me to Richmond. So it didn't take me very long to realize that certain parts of the community were totally segregated, and that in the flatlands most people were living in what I consider poverty, and that just below the hills were middle-class, and then the hills were all middle-class and upper middle-class families. One of the most dangerous areas in Richmond is North Richmond, and that's where I was being 00:41:00sent, at night. I had no idea. So I would just get out of my car, and if there were some young women on the street they would look at me, and I would say "I'm looking for this address, can you tell me -- ?" I didn't know that I needed to be concerned, and no one ever bothered me or threatened me. I just think if you treat people with dignity and respect, the probability is they're going to treat you back the same way. So nothing ever happened to me. But after I was doing it for quite a while, one of my coworkers said, "They're sending you where?" So I said, "Well, I haven't had any problems." So she said, "Do you know what the crime rate is there?" And I said, "I think it's better if I don't know, because then I'll be afraid to go back."REDMAN: In retrospect, looking back on it, that was a hugely important turning
point for Bay Area transportation. A lot of people will argue that that's 00:42:00actually a big turning point in Bay Area identity, sort of figuring out what's in the BART loop, what's outside of the BART loop, how do you define what's in the San Francisco Bay Area? I'd imagine having a stop in Richmond, and where do you place these very important BART stops, that must've been a really important survey for people to take part in.FOGELSON: Well, it was, and they had a real cross-section of every community we
went to, because it was all nine counties in the Bay Area. So people who had less of a challenge getting in the door and leaving the materials and explaining it were given the most challenging communities to go to; and people who didn't have as hard a time or just said, I won't go there, they sent them maybe over to Marin County. But I was almost always in the flatlands of Oakland or Richmond. 00:43:00REDMAN: Was that a further eye-opening experience? I wonder if that was starting
to give you the skills of working with different people in different sorts of environments. I'm wondering how that may have been shaping you at that time.FOGELSON: I think it might've done it unconsciously. I don't think it was
conscious. I just never had a big problem doing that. I just think if you treat people the way you expected to be treated, most of the time it'll be reciprocal. If you go in either terrified or have racist beliefs, then you're going to treat a person differently and they're going to react differently.REDMAN: I'm just checking how much time we have on this first tape. Let's talk
00:44:00about, then, along those same lines, when you're the opening teacher and kids are coming in and you're inspecting them health-wise; but then you're also sort of getting some opportunity, maybe, to talk to a parent about a situation at home or things of that nature. Can you maybe talk about that experience and what sorts of things you were learning about the home life of some of these kids?FOGELSON: I talked to the parents the same way I would talk to anyone else. If
it was the week after Thanksgiving, I might ask, "Did you do anything special for Thanksgiving?" And the mother might say, "Well, we all went to my mother's; that's what we always do, and she makes the dinner." And I'd say, "Oh, did you have anything delicious?" Then they would tell me about what they have. If there 00:45:00was an event in the community, like they would have a Juneteenth fair at Nicholl Park, I would ask them, did they go to that? And if they haven't been, next year they should try to make it a priority, because it's a really exciting affair to go to, for your children, because there's things there about your own culture. So we just talked about everything. If you make what some people call small talk with people, and they sort of get to know you, they start to build a trusting relationship with you. So then if something isn't going right in their family, they feel more comfortable saying, "Do you have a couple minutes I could talk to you?" Because you don't threaten them. They feel sort of like you're almost a friend. So I've always found that you make conversation with whatever the parent 00:46:00is interested in talking about, and how important -- I don't think sometimes people in education realize that a casual relationship and that daily interaction that you have -- it's something in elementary through high school -- teachers don't have the opportunity to do that. When they call somebody at home, they know, "Oh, my goodness, my child must've done something. Why is the teacher calling me?" [file is paused while they deal with barking dog]REDMAN: When we left off just a moment ago we were talking about the kids coming
in in the morning and some of the challenges the parents may face, and their opening up to teachers and expressing one thing or another. What percentage of 00:47:00the parents, if you had to venture a guess, when you first arrived there -- and maybe this is something that changed over time -- percentage of the parents that were working? Say both the mother and the father would be working, so as to necessitate their needing to take the kids somewhere during the day. Was that a pretty common scenario amongst the students?FOGELSON: Well, in order to be eligible for the program they either had to be
working or be a full-time student; they could be medically disabled and their doctor could write a verification of why they need respite for the child. So they would always recommend they go in an educational program; and/or they could be a protective service case, and they want the child to be out of the home during the day, in a stimulating, safe environment. So there were lots of 00:48:00reasons to qualify people. Well, the neighborhood changed, the demographics changed. So in the beginning, I worked at Pullman Children's Center, now called Ruth Powers, on 27th and Main in Richmond. Probably the majority of the students were Caucasian, and some African American, some Hispanic and some Asian. Then the neighborhood began to change and more African-American families bought homes or were renting in the neighborhood. Then we went through a period of time when there was a huge influx of Southeast Asian families that came. They would come to the same neighborhoods, because that was where the lowest rent existed or that's where HUD had subsidized housing available. 00:49:00So yes, I did see it change. Same thing happened to the State Preschool Program;
I saw it change over the years. When I retired, I'm going to say the biggest change was -- we had nineteen sites. Actually seventeen; two had two classrooms. I'm going to say 60 percent of the students were Hispanic and maybe 10 percent were from India. Then the rest of the children were African American, Asian, Caucasian, and/or from anywhere in the world. But there was a definite change in the population, as the neighborhoods began to change.REDMAN: Can you talk about some of the challenges that the teachers were facing
00:50:00when you first arrived? What were some of their biggest challenges?FOGELSON: First of all, well, we took every child. And we tried really hard to
keep a child, even if they had social-emotional problems. We would get children that had ADD or ADHD, and maybe they hadn't been diagnosed yet, or they were misdiagnosed. Then we would get children from all over the world that spoke absolutely no English. Our program, the children's centers, was a full immersion program. So when children are three or four, they learn a second language so quickly. That was one of the things I thought was astonishing, because then you 00:51:00begin to think, "Well, why in our county, do we not start teaching second languages until you're in the ninth grade, when if you're three or four --REDMAN: It's easy.
FOGELSON: -- you could just pick it up? Children are not embarrassed, even if
they mispronounce the words. They want to communicate with the children that don't speak English. So it was kind of fun to watch, because they were willing to try it.So some of the things we started doing -- well, I know I did it, and some other
teachers did, too -- we'd teach them how to count in Spanish or teach them how to say "Good morning." Once they learned the colors in English, we could teach them in another language. And we would sing songs sometimes in other languages and read stories. So by the time I was ready to retire, multi-cultural education 00:52:00became something that you integrated throughout the curriculum. It wasn't just like an isolated subject. It had to be integrated, because children that young don't have the ability to integrate things into their own way of thinking, so you have to do it in a natural way, so then they get it. That was some of the kinds of things that getting, I think, many children of different cultures just sort of gradually changed, that we had to address.Let's see. What else would I say was a challenge? Sometimes communicating with
the parents. So I would ask them if they had an older child -- let's say they came from India or Afghanistan or Yugoslavia -- if they had an older child that could speak English. Lots of parents would tell me their older children don't 00:53:00want to speak their native tongue anymore. So I said, "You can't let them lose that language." So that would be an opportunity for me, when they came in, I would translate and I would tell them, "You know how wonderful it is that you can speak your parent's native language and you can speak English? You don't ever want to lose that, because that's your heritage. That's part of your identity." So the parents would smile, because they've been trying to tell that to them, but kids, they don't get it. They want to be an American and drink Coca-Cola and smoke cigarettes and do everything that American teenagers want to do. So it was a different way for them to perceive themselves. Also the state preschool's office staff were mostly bilingual, as were over half of the classroom aids.REDMAN: It seems like the percentage has changed, the demographic changed. But
early on, what percentage of your students were foreign born? You have a 00:54:00percentage, a sort of guesstimate, versus how many born in the United States?FOGELSON: Well, at different times, it was different. People who came from other
than Latin countries or other than Southeast Asian countries, I would say anywhere from 2 percent to 10 percent. It was a very small number. Then once the neighborhoods began to change and some of them became predominantly Latino, then we would have really large populations of Hispanic families. Same thing when there was a huge influx of Southeast Asian families. You might have 25, 30 00:55:00percent. Like I said, when I left the preschool program, about 60 percent of the students were from Latin or Hispanic countries.Begin Audiofile 2 04-04-2012.mp3
REDMAN: My name is Sam Redman, and I'm back with Sharon Fogelson. Today's April
4, 2012, and this is our second tape together today. We talked about the demographic changes in the neighborhood, and I want to get back to that because that seems like a very important topic. But I'd like to ask a question that has come up in a couple of interviews with students, and that's fire drills at the child development centers. Can you talk about fire drills and possibly a slide escape? 00:56:00FOGELSON: Oh, yes. Well, both Maritime and Pullman were originally built with a
slide escape from the second floor, but the fire department deemed that the second floor was not safe to use for children. They were originally built as sleep rooms, and during the Second World War, when they were open 24/7, the children's cots were all upstairs and they would sleep up there, and then they would have staff to supervise them. You had to have an alternate way to get out, besides the stairway. So the slide was wooden, like a funnel slide. I used to think it was really probably fun for people, if they ever got to use it. But we never did; we just had traditional fire drills. At Pullman, on the second floor 00:57:00-- which is now Ruth Powers -- that's where the director's office and her assistants worked. The head teacher or site director of the school's office was on the main floor, and same thing at Maritime. But we had fire drills every single month, and we would have to make a schedule of the dates and times when we were going to have them. And we had to have disaster drills.My first experience having a fire drill wasn't a fire drill; it was a real fire.
Across the street from Pullman, now called Ruth Powers, there was an old deserted tile factory. One day when all the children were asleep -- you have to understand they're sleeping on cots; all they have on is their underwear, and slippers under their bed -- the fire alarm went off, and they said, "This is not 00:58:00a drill." Then somebody told us that the building exploded across the street, and the embers -- Our building was all wood, because it was built during the Second World War -- were floating on top of our building. It could've so easily ignited. So we had to get all the children up and take them out the back door of the classroom; put their slippers on, also; and then walk all the way back to the grass, to the back fence. The embers were blowing on us back there, and so one of the teachers said to me, "You have the key to the side gate." I said, "What do you mean, I have the key to the side gate?" "Didn't anybody tell you, you have the key to the side gate; that it's in your closet in your classroom?" I said no. "Well, you have to go get it. We're trapped. We can't get out of this 00:59:00yard." So I went in and found it and I came outside. So we decided to take the whole school over to a nearby elementary school that was called Cortez. It was probably about four blocks away.While this was going on, parents were coming, because it was on the radio.
Parents were coming from all over, from every direction, leaving their cars running in the middle of the street, running over and saying, "I'm taking my child." We'd have to say, "Please calm down; all the children are fine. We're going over to Cortez. Why don't you follow us over there? You can help us. If you take your children now, we won't know who's here and who's gone, if we've lost somebody. Their clothes are still in the classroom. They're all safe; nothing's going to happen." So then they would calm down, and they would follow us over there, and then some of them helped us. But that was my first 01:00:00experience. Funny that you asked. That was the only fire, to my knowledge, that ever occurred. My luck, it would happen to me. I'm brand new on the job, and here I have the most important instrument, the magic key to the gate.REDMAN: And that building across the street, did that burn to the ground? That
was a tile factory.FOGELSON: It's gone. Gone. Yes. It was a really serious fire.
REDMAN: You'd mentioned that the building was all wood, and you've talked a
little bit about its World War II history and its World War II construction. I'm wondering if you can talk for me, for a moment, about did some of the older teachers there have -- was there an institutional memory of the World War II days in the child development center? And if so, what did people talk about when they talked about World War II?FOGELSON: They talked about that they came to live in Richmond because some of
01:01:00them could get work in the shipyards, either their husband or themselves, or their husband worked in the shipyards and then got drafted. They lived in public housing that was right near Maritime Children's Center and Pullman. There was public housing, and so they were able to live so close to where they worked that they could just walk to work. It was two to five blocks away. And they would talk about that they were fortunate to find jobs during the war and that they were able to start doing work that formerly only men were ever hired to do. The children's centers were opened, part of the WPA Act during the Second World War. 01:02:00Then after the war, the state took the funding over. They were only funded
yearly, so they never knew, from one year to the next, if they were going to have funding. They actually were, I think, in education, far ahead of their time, because they already understood what children like me were exposed to in kindergarten. That's not how a kindergarten is anymore. Since they have standards-based education, someone came up with the idea that if you just push all the standards down, then by the time the children are learning to read and learning math, then they'll be functioning on grade level. It doesn't work that way. When you try to teach children something they're not developmentally ready to learn, it's not going to happen. There's always a few exceptions. Those are the kids, usually, that get later identified as gifted. But the average child 01:03:00pretty much learns the same thing at the same age span -- three to four, four to five, five to six. So they were doing things like role playing and building with blocks, which is really geometry and math concepts, with things far before lots of other educational institutions realized the importance of them. And that for us, lots of our children -- because they didn't speak English, was one of the problems. But some children didn't have social skills, so they didn't know how to wait turns, or if they wanted something, and you wouldn't give it to them, they'd hit you over the head with it. You only had maybe five bicycles and you had thirty children, so we'd have a waiting list, and they'd sign up. When it 01:04:00was their turn, we would let them know, and then you could use a timer, like an egg timer. So you can have it for ten minutes, and then the list indicated who was the next person. That was also like pre-reading, because they would see the children's names on the list.The people that worked in the children's centers during the Second World War
were like a family. They had a kind of closeness. I think all schools where teachers stay for longs periods of time become close-knit, but this was just extraordinary. If someone in your family passed away, my supervisor would arrange it so maybe twenty people could come to the funeral. They would give you money personally, and they would bring food. I don't mean one meal; I mean food 01:05:00for days. When my mother passed away, I remember my aunt's family saying, "I've worked all different places, but I've never seen anybody do all the things that they've done to support you. They don't ask, they just tell you. 'We're coming and we're going to help you and please accept it.'" I just thought it was really amazing, because it's at a time when you're so vulnerable in your life. And not everybody has a lot of family who lives close. Or someone will fly in for the funeral, and then they leave. So everybody'd been through the same thing, and so it was very comforting to have those coworkers as support. And they don't just do it for a day. They keep in touch with you; they call you. They might come and take you out to dinner after you go back to your own house, because they know 01:06:00that you're probably still grieving. I just thought it was remarkable.REDMAN: First of all, it sounds like that's an amazing incentive to stay there,
as a young teacher, if there were these older teachers who could be these great mentors, but then also people who were this community that supported you.FOGELSON: Yeah. The first teacher I ever worked with, her name was S.A. Jenkins.
She passed away a few years ago, and we'd kept in touch until she passed away. I remember the first day I came into the classroom. I said to her, "I have a few questions to ask you." So she said, "Oh, yes, go ahead. Whatever you want to know." So we had two-year-olds. They were supposed to be potty trained, but maybe two or three were not 100 percent. So I said to her, "I'd like to ask you 01:07:00what happens if one of the children has an accident in their pants?" So she said, "Well, whoever finds it cleans it." And I said, "Well, you can be sure I'll never find it." And she said, "Well, you're going to be a joy to work with, I can see." But things like that. Then she showed me the classroom schedule and what your responsibilities were and what kind of activities you do with the children. There were times in the schedule where you could plan new things to do.So that's what really kind of lit me on fire, because my supervisor created a
committee of -- there were four teachers to develop science curriculum. So I personally, as an adult student, was not good in science; but for children, I could do it. It was really easy. And it also included cooking, using 01:08:00individualized recipes. So when a child cooked, they made the whole product themselves. And we made picture recipes. Each step that they did -- and you set it up in sequence -- would have a picture, like if you're stirring something or you're cutting something. So when they go to the end, they made the whole product themselves. Let's say it was fruit salad. They cut up the banana and they'd cut up the apple. They did the whole thing themselves. And we used to make butter and peanut butter. One of their favorite things was -- I discovered that you could buy biscuits in a canister and just roll them out and make a little pizza. Then we would put all different toppings, and they could pick whatever they wanted. I'd put them on cookie sheets with the children's name, and then after they would bake them in the kitchen for me they would get back, actually, the pizza that they made. So that was a way to get some children to 01:09:00start tasting raw tomatoes or grated onions. "Oh, I don't eat that." "Well, it tastes different on a pizza." "Oh, okay, I'll try it." So it was a way that they felt like they chose to do it, so they would try things they hadn't eaten before.REDMAN: Do you think the teachers generally shared the same vision for the
school and for education? Or was there ever a tension there, where different teachers might have a different sort of idea of how to go about something?FOGELSON: I think there was some difference in the age groups, because there
were -- [car alarm goes off in background]REDMAN: I might want to check and make sure that that's not my vehicle.
FOGELSON: Yes. [audio file stops & restarts]
REDMAN: Where we left off I was asking if people shared a similar vision as
teachers, or a similar idea to go about -- do you have any other thoughts on 01:10:00that? Do you want to add to that?FOGELSON: Yes. I would say that most of the teachers shared the same vision. One
of the differences -- and this is my perspective; other people may not feel the same way. But when I first came to work in the children's centers in the middle sixties, the curriculum was primarily art, music, language arts, creative play, social interaction. And there was also lots of manipulatives, like puzzles -- that's visual perception -- and cutting and beads you could string; so they're hand-eye coordination projects. But they were done without specifically making 01:11:00that the goal of the activity. So, for example, I think that as younger teachers started to come in, they started to enrich the program, so that you were covering number concepts, but integrating it through the whole curriculum, maybe not just stringing beads and counting them; and other cognitive concepts, like classification and seriation. Then science really grew, once the committees started. So everyone had a science table in their room, and then everybody got a water table, and we would buy all kinds of things to put in the water table that you could measure with. That was like a work station, and you could choose that as one of the places that you wanted to spend the free time in.REDMAN: Do you know what brought about the appearance of the science committee?
01:12:00I know that the schools had a long-standing reputation, in terms of art and creative play. But what brought about the existence of the science committee in that era?FOGELSON: Well, my boss, Mary Hall Prout, wanted to get a committee together
because I think that it's something that a lot of teachers don't feel comfortable doing. So I think she believed that if we developed a curriculum around science that was at a level that three-, four-, five-year-olds could comprehend, that more teachers would do it. And she had us do workshops for them so that we could demonstrate exactly the kinds of projects. We recommended it might be planting beans or starting a garden so children could learn how 01:13:00vegetables grow. Then I asked her, I said, "We have all this space outside. Would you let the custodian rototill it? We'd put a small fence around it and every two classrooms could have a garden." So she said, "Well, let me figure out how much it would cost, and I'll talk to him." So they did it. First, I was the only one who had the garden. The other teachers were just kind of watching. Then after they saw what was happening they decided they wanted to do it, too. So we would plant a multitude of things. Things that grow quickly, like carrots and radishes and green beans. Then they would be the ones who watered them, as needed, and also they would harvest them. Then I would take them to the kitchen 01:14:00in the morning and I would -- if they were green beans, I would ask the cook, "Could you wash and cook these for us so that there's three bowls, that we could have them with our lunch today?" They said, "Oh, these grew in your yard out there?" I said, "Oh, yeah. We have a really nice crop of vegetables." So that one really grew into a lot more.So we did that for a really long time. People maintained the gardens. One
concern we had was, would people in the neighborhood come in and take the vegetables? Because they were nicer than you could buy in the store. They were like farmers-market kind of vegetables. Or would people come in and mess up our little picket fences? They really didn't bother it. I was really pleased that they respected that the children were learning from it. Then when they moms 01:15:00would pick them up, "Oh, come on, I'll show you our vegetable garden. We ate the beans today with our lunch." So then they'd become more curious, to want to know about more things, like where does fruit come from?REDMAN: That's a really great point. Can you talk for a moment about art and the
tradition of making art in these schools?FOGELSON: Well, I wasn't there when it happened. I met Monica Haley, who was the
art director. She retired the year I started working. I think I came in January and she retired, I think, in June.REDMAN: Can you talk about her a little bit? Maybe that brief interaction with
her, if she was retiring.FOGELSON: Yes. Well, she is the innovator of children, for the most part, doing
real children's art. Most art that teachers do with children are the teacher's 01:16:00concept, and then everybody makes the same thing. I see teachers still doing this. They might be sitting and cutting out pumpkin shapes, and then they might cut out different things that you could make the eyes, the nose and the mouth with. So that's teacher art. You decided what the child was going to make. If you're doing a Halloween project, the developmentally appropriate way is you give the children all different kinds of materials, say in Halloween colors. Anything, construction paper or poster paint, pipe cleaners, orange and black and green felt, all kinds of materials. You could say, "You can make anything you want. I can you give you some ideas, if you need ideas." Then every holiday, I would make Play-Doh that was the colors of the holidays. I would make orange 01:17:00and black or orange and green for Halloween and red and pink for Valentines. The children loved it. And I used to put Kool-Aid in it, so that it smelled like the color. Almost all children than drank Kool-Aid, so they recognized the smell.Monica Haley emphasized easel painting; finger printing; monoprinting, which is
you make a fingerprint on a piece of linoleum, and then you press the paper on it and peel it off and it makes the reverse print. She also did watercolors. And she would cut shapes -- triangles, circles, squares, rectangles -- and then the children would take the precut shapes, and they'd make whatever they want with them, paste them or glue them on paper. The only thing that the younger people, 01:18:00that were my age when we came, had issues with was that she was very emphatic about how you should set up the activity. There was only one way to do it, and only one way to clean up. So we just thought that was really strange. So, for example, she would say, "Cover this table with butcher paper, and then line up all the poster paints, with the brush in them, then make a dot in front of each one," so the child could see the color. They could only take one at a time to the easel and paint, and then put it back, and then they could take another one. So I just thought that was really weird, and I said, "Why don't you just get a set of them, so that each child has all the colors? There's a tray on the easel for you to put them." Then she had a certain way of cleaning up. There would be 01:19:00a little bowl on the table, so you didn't go in the bathroom and use the sink to wash your hands; you washed your hands in the bowl, and then you dried them with paper towels. So I just thought, "Well, why do you have sinks that are child-sized, if you can only use them after you go to the toilet? Why can't you use them to wash your hands to take the paint off of them?"So it was those kinds of issues that some of the younger teachers had concerns
about. It wasn't her belief system, because she was one of the few people that understood the difference between children's art and teacher art. If you go into almost any elementary classroom today, sometimes with the exception of kindergarten, you look on the wall in there, it's twenty-five pumpkins, twenty-five Christmas trees, twenty-five snowmen. That's the difference. Whose was totally creative? After a while, teachers began to understand that art is 01:20:00developmental, and that when you're two years old, you just put one color over another and you don't know what -- the child tells you what he/she painted, but you would never know. Then when they're three, it starts to become more distinct. By the time they're four, they're not mixing the colors together; they're already separating them. By the time they're five they're making the sun and stick figures, which is more representational. So you can look at a painting, when you're an early childhood teacher, and you can say, "Oh, that was probably made by a three-year-old, and that one was made by a five-year-old."REDMAN: You can start to see these patterns of development
FOGELSON: Yes, because they are developmental. All we ever taught the children
to do was how to use the media. So when you took the paint you took the brush and dipped it in. Then you wiped some of it off so that it didn't drip all over your paper, and then you painted. Then you put it back in the same dot where you 01:21:00took it, and then you take another color. Then the other thing she always had us do is, whatever a child made, regardless of the media they used, is to ask them to tell you about the picture. Then we would write. During the Second World War -- and you can see some of the pictures in this book that Joseph Fisher wrote; some of them were painting battleships and a gun shooting at planes flying overhead -- the children were astutely aware of the fact that a war was going on. It was a really good way for them to express their feelings about it.REDMAN: By the mid-1960s, there are a number of different themes going on that
I'd like to ask you about. But before we leave art, I wonder what types of things, if you noticed patterns of what kids would paint. We talked about sort 01:22:00of the developmental stages there, but during the war, there were sort of these thematics of the bombs and the ships and the planes and sort of kids trying to sort that out through their art. Were there things that they were trying to sort out in your era? We talked a little bit about in the 1960s, some of the riots in Richmond, and I'm wondering if maybe you could talk about that and how that affected your children's lives.FOGELSON: Well, when I was working at Pullman Children's Center it was in the
late sixties, when some of the riots occurred. The government -- the city council and the mayor and the police department -- decided that in order to try to keep people safe, that -- I think it was between 10:00 p.m. at night and 6:00 01:23:00a.m. in the morning -- you couldn't be on the street unless you had to be at work between those hours. So I was the opening teacher, so I had to be there at 6:00. I think we put a sign up and told the parents we'd just be a few minutes late, because of the restrictions about when you can come off the freeway. I was a commuter, so I would time what time I needed to leave, so I was just coming off the freeway at 6:00; and it took me about five or ten more minutes, about probably five minutes more, to get to my school. So it wasn't a real inconvenience, because we tried to be open when the early-morning parents came.But there was a lot of tension in the community. People were scared. I don't
care what race you were, people were just scared that their business could be 01:24:00damaged, their home, that their children could get hurt, their car could get burned. Anything was possible. But I do remember that it ended fairly quickly. It didn't last a really long time, thank goodness. And in terms of what the children's art expressed, the children who could actually draw something representational almost always made their family. Part of that was because so many children came from single-family homes; part of it was because they were immigrants, and part of their family was still in another country and part of it was here. Part of it could've been the tensions racially that were going on in so many communities. I think there's various reasons. That was one thing almost 01:25:00every child liked to talk about. They mostly made stick figures.Then the other thing I noticed was that what lots of children did wasn't
different than what I did or other children my age did when we were in kindergarten, and that was paint green hills and a sun and stick figures of people, and then an A-framed house. That wasn't any different than what we did, and I thought it was interesting that that was still something that they liked to represent.REDMAN: What about music? Can you talk about music? Was that a component of the curriculum?
FOGELSON: Well, yes, it was. And for me, it was really hard because I can't
sing, and I don't play an instrument. The children never figured that out. But 01:26:00every classroom had a set of musical instruments. They were like tambourines and a triangle and rhythm sticks, cymbals -- what do you call those little things?REDMAN: Sure, cymbals.
FOGELSON: They're not cymbals, but the little metal ones that you clank together.
REDMAN: Some sort of bell, yeah.
FOGELSON: And we had bells. So we had music, so that our musical instruments
were in a container, and they were up on the block shelf. If children wanted to make their own band, that was something they wanted to do, over in the block area; they were free to do that. But I used to do it regularly at circle time so that everybody could pick an instrument that they could play, and then we would try to keep time to a song we would sing -- so it might be Old MacDonald Had a Farm -- to see if everyone could learn the rhythm to go with the song. We sang 01:27:00lots of songs. And I have the worst voice you've ever heard in your life, but the kids don't care. So we sang everything. Sometimes they chose what the songs would be that we would sing.Then we had a phonograph, and we had some records. But I used to buy lots of
extra ones. On rainy days, we didn't have a gym or somewhere we could take the children to burn off energy. You were in that classroom all day long. You didn't work more than eight hours, but from 6:00 in the morning till 6:00 at night, they were in a classroom till they went home. And they have a lot of energy. I can't think of the person who made these records, but I had several of them. It was all about body movement. So on rainy days, I had certain things that I would bring out and then it was the rainy-day music. So they loved to do them, because 01:28:00you'd crawl on the floor like a worm, and there were all body movements so that they could burn some of that energy off, because there wasn't another option. Sometimes we'd make a parade. If it was Chinese New Year, we could make a parade and we'd try to make a dragon, and then we'd go down the hall. So any way that you could think to integrate music or rhythm or body movement into other things you were doing -- we'd try not to just do things in isolation, but integrate them into things children could relate to.REDMAN: Can you talk for a moment -- there's two questions. Well, first, let's
talk about unionization. So I understand that the school unionized in around 1964.FOGELSON: The program unionized. The whole program. There were, at that time, I
01:29:00think four children's centers: Pullman, Maritime, Lake and Peres, I believe. Then later, Crescent Park opened. During the war, I think there were fourteen centers in Richmond. It's unfortunate that they weren't able to stay open, because right now, there's so much federal money coming into communities like Oakland, Richmond, Vallejo, where students are not functioning at grade level, and this money is used for programs to try to close the achievement gap. All the research indicates that if a child goes to a high-quality preschool program -- not any preschool program, a high-quality preschool program; that's usually defined as for the teacher to have a minimum of a bachelor's degree and preferably, a teaching credential -- that this has a huge impact on students' 01:30:00lives. I was trained in a curriculum many years later, called HighScope, that comes out of Ypsilanti, Michigan. It covers all the areas of curriculum, and is developmental, and has a way to assess children. But the most important thing is, it's one of the first early childhood programs that followed children from preschool age to adulthood. I don't know if you're at all familiar with the research from that program; are you?REDMAN: No.
FOGELSON: Well, some of the things that are really dramatic are that if a child
goes to a preschool program for two years that's high quality, that comes from poverty, they grew up in poverty, number one, they almost never become a 01:31:00special-ed student. They almost never become a juvenile delinquent. Most of them graduate from high school. A very high percentage of them go on to university. This is just because they've been exposed to a curriculum that teaches them skills that all of us who are middle class just learn and never think about. For example, I would talk to parents about, "You can teach your children classification and number concepts; let them help you sort the laundry." So if they have siblings, first they put all their brothers and then all their sisters in a pile. That's classifying which child the belongings go to. "Then," I said, "you can have them put all the t-shirts in a pile, all the socks together, all the underwear, all the trousers together. Then you can teach them how to fold 01:32:00them, so that they have a certain shape and they fit in a drawer, that everything has a place. You put all things of the same kind together. Then you match the socks up. You first do it by color, and then you check to see; some are going to be longer and some shorter, so you have to find one that matches the one you're holding." Those kinds of things that we did at home -- or set the table -- you're learning one-to-one correspondence. If you have four people, you need four plates, four sets of silverware, four glasses. We don't think about that. Perhaps in some homes where it's customary for the mother to do everything, that the children don't get an opportunity to do those things; and so when they come to kindergarten, they don't understand what those concepts mean. So if you go to preschool, you're exposed to all those kinds of things, in 01:33:00all different areas of cognitive development and creative development and social-emotional skills; that you may come from a family where that's not a priority and other things are a priority. So some of those kids come and know how to do some things middleclass children don't know how to do.REDMAN: I'd like to get back to unions, the formation of the union, in a moment.
But along those lines that you were just talking about, I'm wondering if you could speak to standardized testing. What we think of now is this incredible influx of standardized testing. You've mentioned the linkage of federal dollars and standardized testing -- obviously, No Child Left Behind being a big representation of that. But standardized testing, you'd mentioned, even as a young girl, being tested on certain things and remembering that. But can you 01:34:00talk about how that's changed, maybe?FOGELSON: Well, I think it has good and bad to it. I think what happened is the
federal government started looking at the achievement problem all over the country, especially in inner cities, and they said, we have to do something to change this. So they came up with standards and benchmarks as part of it. I think that having teaching standards and benchmarks is an excellent idea, because you have to have a focus, at the end of the year, what you expect children to learn. But some of the negative sides of it are that your API score, your test scores, they become the holy grail and it gets to be the only thing that people look at. So maybe you're not a good test taker, but you could do 01:35:00everything. You can perform any kind of task and put everything together and always know the answers to all the questions, but you're not a good test taker. So you might perform really low because you don't have really good language skills or understand when you read the problem, what is it they're looking for?Then the other thing is that they push the standards down. So now, first grade
is kindergarten and second grade is first grade. I think they made a really serious mistake doing that because, one, sooner doesn't make it happen. Offering it sooner and insisting children learn these standards and benchmarks -- they expect them to start reading in kindergarten. Well, in Europe, they teach children how to read when they're eight years old, and when they grow up they just function fine in the world. So it's not that sooner is better. It's you 01:36:00need to give them the pre-skills that they get in preschool and kindergarten, so that when I went to school and I went to first grade I was totally ready to learn how to read. I think that's the mistake. Not that they created them, but when they're age appropriate and that the test has become the only thing that people look at when they look at your school.In fact, the State Department of Education sent all the state preschool and
child development programs, when I was just starting in the State Preschool Program, a letter telling us that we absolutely should never use standardized testing with young children, and that we should be doing written observations. So they developed an instrument called Desired Results, then I did in service 01:37:00with my staff. So what we did was, we looked at what the learning concepts were. So if it was being able to enumerate objects one to ten, we might use pegboards one day or string beads one day, and I might say to you, "Sam, can you count how many beads you've put on your string?" Then if you can count to ten or past, I put, he knows how to do it. So you just do it in a normal way. Or with the pegboard, and I'd say, "Sam, can you tell me how many red pegs you have?" So that's two things you're looking for: how many and can you identify by color?All those kinds of concepts are part of Desired Results. So I would show
teachers how you can do activities that are just a normal part of your daily 01:38:00program, where you can just observe this and then you just check off that they know it. Or you write down, "Sam counted ten red pegs." Or "Sam put something in order, from smaller to largest." Seriate. So whatever you're looking for could be a natural part of -- I think that people have all different belief systems, even in early childhood. I opened a Montessori classroom, and I'm not a big fan of Montessori because the adult demonstrates, and you just keep demonstrating it until the child replicates what you're doing. It's not that they don't learn the concepts, but I don't think it's a natural way. For me, it doesn't evolve out of the child; it's coming from the adult to the child. So I like it better when the 01:39:00child discovers they can do and they go, "Look teacher, I can count now to ten." Or "I can find all the red ones," or "I can find all the blue ones." So I had a Montessori model -- because when I expanded the State Preschool Program, I did focus groups, and a lot of parents wanted one. So we did a dual-immersion Montessori classroom. In fact, the lady who was the preschool teacher of that classroom is now the director of the Maritime's Child Development Program. Peppina Chang, the renovated site. So she has a preschool program and a charter school there.REDMAN: Can you talk about the responsibilities of the head teacher?
FOGELSON: Right, but I don't think I answered your question about unions.
REDMAN: Oh, unions. Sure, let's go back to that. So the programs were unionized
01:40:00in around 1964, and Henry Clark, I understand, had Local Number 1. So can you explain what that -- ?FOGELSON: Right. So for a very long time, decades, the teachers in WCCUSD were
classified employees, and the school district chose to make them classified employees. So they were the same, in terms of classification, as a clerk or a paraprofessional or a custodian or a gardener. And we believed that teachers should be certificated, like all other teachers are. So when I came to work in the children's centers, there had been a union for a couple years, and so I got real excited about the prospect of making changes -- the salaries were really low. We got health benefits and were in PERS, the retirement system, and we paid into Social Security, Public Employees Retirement System. But the salaries were 01:41:00really, really low. Also the teachers worked more hours than an elementary teacher, and as classified employees you started out with two weeks' vacation a year. Then we look over and see a kindergarten teacher is off two and a half months in the summer, a week at Christmas, a week at New Years, a week at Easter. So we said, "There's something wrong with this picture." So I was the third president of Local 1. So I said, "We have to raise everybody's salaries, because they're really low." And some people needed to be reclassified, because they were doing work out of their job description.Then we wanted to get the teachers to be certificated. In the California
01:42:00Education Code, it says they are deemed to be certificated. So we tried everything. We tried to negotiate it with the director; we tried to negotiate it with the head of personnel; we tried to negotiate it with the superintendent, who was Dr. Snodgrass at the time. We just couldn't get anyplace. We made board presentations and finally requested a County Council opinion. And Henry Clark was old-time union, hellfire and brimstone. He liked to yell and periodically curse and intimidate. He got a lot done. I'm not saying that he wasn't effective. But almost all the people in our program were women, and so they'd say to me, "Could you please ask him, when he's speaking in our behalf, not to use profanity and to be more gentlemanly-like?" I said, "Well, I will ask him, but I can't promise." So I asked him, and he said, "Well, I'll try my best. It's not my nature to be the other way." And I said, "Well, do the best you can, because these women are paying dues, and I have to tell them that we had a chat about it." 01:43:00REDMAN: So I do want to ask, to what extent do you think women were
discriminated against, sort of either in conscious or unconscious ways, in terms of salary and benefits and things like that? In the particular context that you were in, it seems like the salaries were lower, the hours were more challenging.FOGELSON: Well, it was discriminatory because, number one, people thought we
babysat children all day. Their mothers went to work or school and we just babysat them. To this day, I'm not sure everyone that's management in educational programs understands what child development programs do and what they offer. And they're all different; they're not all the same. I think that that was what part of the problem was. The other part was the funding was 01:44:00limited. So when Dr. Snodgrass was the superintendent, he came up with the idea to have an override tax. So it could be one cent on every hundred dollars that your house is assessed at. So we were able to get some additional money there, for our program, and so the years that I worked in the children's center, I think that we accomplished a lot. We tried for a really long time to get the teachers changed over to be certificated and to be on the work year and the work day and the work calendar of an elementary teacher, and we finally did it. The way we did it was most interesting, because nothing conventional worked. So another teacher that I worked with, named Mary Owen, and I, we were both -- I was what you call site director, head teacher at Maritime. She came up with the 01:45:00idea and said, "Why don't we talk to Senator Leroy Greene -- he's the education senator -- and see if has any suggestions?" So we got ahold of him, and I think we wrote him a letter and told him everything we had tried. So he said, "It states in the Ed Code that you are deemed to be certificated; you need to have Mr. Clark ask for a county council opinion on the interpretation of what that means." So we did, and they wrote us back and told us that it means we need to be changed from classified to certificated employees.So we went public. Henry went to the board, so the whole community knew that we
felt like we were being treated unfairly. So Dr. Snodgrass was the superintendent, so he changed us over to the teacher salary schedule. There was 01:46:00something like twenty-four steps. He said, "I'll give you the first half." So for every year you've worked, you would've gone up a higher step. "In the next year, I'll give you the second half. Then the first year, I'll give you the first three columns; the second year, the last three." So every time you completed fifteen additional units, you moved to the next column. So you went down by years, and over by education. So once we got it, I said, "I'm going from here to there in a straight diagonal."So I went to school all the time, to finish as many units as I can. That was
really big. Then we had to figure out -- we were open all twelve months, so how were we going to give people all these vacations? So there was a huge cost incurred, and so we had to hire more teacher substitutes. We would fill out a 01:47:00calendar every year, and you'd put what you wanted. Then during Christmas and Easter and New Years, most of the children didn't come to school. So I would say maybe out of 200, fifty came to school, so we'd only have to open a couple classrooms or we could break them up into four classrooms. We didn't have to hire people, because some people wanted to work then so they could take that time off in another time. So it all worked out okay. Then we were able to raise people's salaries.One of the things we focused on a lot was our contract, to ensure that it
spelled out certain things so that if they were violated, people could file a grievance. Because if it's not in the contract, you can't grieve it. So I just 01:48:00got really, really interested in this. And we had a couple arbitrations. One was, we asked that the group aides, who were the paraprofessionals, be reclassified and paid more because when we opened in the morning, in two classrooms, there were only a paraprofessional and no teacher in each classroom, which was a violation of the law. So when we went to arbitration. I was the opening teacher, so I was in charge of the school. But I can't see through the walls; I don't know what's going on in a classroom. So they asked me would I testify in their behalf, and I said "Sure." So I had to testify in opposition of my boss, which was sometimes uncomfortable because we became personal friends 01:49:00over the years. To this day, we are still personal friends, and she's going to be ninety years old in August. I said to her, "I don't know how we ever became personal friends," because we were always on different sides of union positions, but we were on the same side when it came to educating children and serving families.REDMAN: I am going to pop in one final tape here. Hang on a second.
Begin Audiofile 3 04-04-2012.mp3
REDMAN: My name is Sam Redman. I'm back with Sharon Fogelson. This is tape
three, on April 4, 2012. When we left off, we were talking about some of the differences that you may have had with your supervisor over union developments and negotiations and things of that nature. You also said something that I thought was very interesting, was that the scale, the pay scale, was incentivized based on the time that you had been at the school, but then also 01:50:00your educational background and credentials and the number of relevant units that you had. That created an incentive for you to go back to school.FOGELSON: Correct.
REDMAN: Was that the same sort of thing for a lot of teachers? A similar
situation, do you think?FOGELSON: Well, public school teachers are on the same salary schedule, so I
think for the majority of teachers, that it is an incentive. We're not exactly the highest paid educated people in society. So it was one of the few opportunities that you had to move up on the salary schedule. And everybody, whether you were classified or certificated, got a step raise every year, except classified in our district only got five steps and then they got longevity after ten years, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. So I do believe it was an incentive for 01:51:00people to go to school. And then lots of just enjoyed going to school and keeping up on all the latest thinking in education.REDMAN: It sounds like that was another aspect of it for you; that you were
interested in the research that was going on, and that those ideas might be applied to the classroom. How would you keep up on those sorts of things? You also talked about new young teachers coming in with different ideas, maybe, about how to solve a problem; then also your differences from some of the older generation. Can you talk about that dynamic of it?FOGELSON: Yes. Most of the older generation were open to enriching the
curriculum in areas that we thought it needed strengthening, and some of them thought that what they were doing was adequate. I think more people than not 01:52:00thought that it was a good idea to make sure that the curriculum was more balanced or that it -- some people might say, who were working in that time, well, we did cover cognitive concepts such as classification, number concepts, seriation, et cetera, but we did it developmentally through manipulatives or puzzles or whatever. We wanted there to be more focus on the cognitive concepts, because those were also areas of weakness some students had when they started kindergarten, that made it more of a challenge. The younger people were not very patient, if people were not willing for them to do more, because they felt they had more to offer. These were primarily credentialed teachers, so they did their student teaching in elementary school. So we weren't advocating that they do 01:53:00that, but we were advocating that someplace in between the two, there was a happy medium, and that you need to make sure you balance and integrate all the cognitive concepts and all the creative experiences and all the social-emotional skills throughout your whole day, so that it's not just learning in isolation.And it depended on the culture of your school, because the culture of your
school, in my mind, is developed by the leadership, the person in the leadership role. So whomever the head teacher was, or what you call site director, had a big influence on whether or not the changes were accepted willingly. Also whether or not the director promoted them. One thing I can say about Mary Hall Prout is that in lots of ways, she was a role model for me. Because bedsides 01:54:00being a classroom teacher, when she went on vacation, she would leave me in charge. So I learned how you do all the paperwork, how you enroll a student, and how you check through the papers to make sure that everything has been completed, and that whoever did them to determine eligibility, did it correctly, and if they paid a fee that it was determined correctly, and what breakfast and lunch category they were in. So all those things that go on behind the scenes, she gave me the opportunity to learn. And I really appreciated that, because when I went to the other program, all of those things were on my plate, including making budgets for programs other than child development programs.REDMAN: Can you talk about your rise up to the point of being head teacher?
01:55:00FOGELSON: Well, I knew that I wanted to have more of a leadership role and that
I could have a bigger influence if I was in a position, rather than a teacher saying, we need to do X, Y, Z. So the first position I got was a head teacher at Peres Children's Center, and that was a very small school. We only had three classrooms, very young children in two of them, all under five; and then we had extended day. Then the head teacher, who was Irene Hufford at Maritime, retired, and I put in for that job and got it. Then the site supervisor, director or head teacher at Crescent Park retired. And Maritime and Pullman were the two biggest 01:56:00schools and we got paid the same, if you worked at a smaller school. So after being at Maritime for a very long time -- also I had numerous teachers at that school who were younger and who became, eventually, principals in the school district, so they kind of put me through what I was doing to Mary Prout. So I said, "What goes around comes around." But I was really proud of them, because most of them rose up and became elementary school principals or were in other leadership roles in the teacher's union. So that was really exciting.REDMAN: Was there something about the program in those days, do you think, that
encouraged teachers to go on to those leadership roles? Was there anything in particular?FOGELSON: First of all, I think that being the kinds of teachers they were they
01:57:00were attracted to our program because they believed in developmental learning. Okay? They understood what it was. And they believed in a comprehensive curriculum that was integrated. They believed that when you assess a child's development you don't just test them, that there's numerous ways and numerous things that you can look at in addition to standardized tests. So they already had that kind of mindset. And then they were people who were all looking for a bigger challenge. So sometimes I felt like we were growing principals, because so many of them went on. One went on to be the president of the teachers union. So there were all different kinds of roles in the district people could move on to. I was never interested in leaving the child development program. I didn't 01:58:00want to be a public school principal; I didn't want to be part of management; I wanted to stay in early childhood. So then when the district was in really bad financial shape and they had to give the contract back to the state, for the children's centers, most of them, except for one -- the Y took over Peres, and the rest of them became part of the county program.REDMAN: So this was in the nineties?
FOGELSON: Yeah, in the early nineties. I believe it was in the early nineties.
So I was supposed to become a kindergarten teacher at Castro Elementary, and one day I got a phone call from the head of personnel. She said, "How would you like to be the head of the State Preschool Program?" I said, "Are you kidding?" And 01:59:00she said no, and I said, "I would love to do that," I said, "because I really don't want to go back to being a classroom teacher, but there weren't any other options available." And they were cutting administrators and cutting salaries. Actually, the way I got the job was, the person who became the director's name was Karen Hancox. She's deceased now. She was put over the children's center program before the county took them over, and she didn't know anything about them. So she knew that I wanted that job. So she called me in one day, and she said, "It's really embarrassing for me to ask you this, but can you show me how to do all the paperwork and how you certify families?" So I said, "Sure, I'll show you." So I taught her how to do all that, and so I think when I got that appointment -- this was before we had unions and you had to apply for everything 02:00:00-- that she was responsible for that happening to me. And I really appreciated that it did. Now tell me your question again.REDMAN: Oh, sure. No, that's fine. Maybe we could talk about, just briefly, what
that career path then, to become the head of preschool --FOGELSON: Well, it was interesting, because that was the program I wasn't
qualified for, on your first tape, remember?REDMAN: Right, yeah.
FOGELSON: I went to be interviewed, and Wilma Winters took me, and they said,
"You don't have a teaching credential, so you're not qualified. So when I was made the coordinator of that program, my mother was gone then, and I said, "My mother is probably turning over in her grave," because I had to come home and tell her I didn't get that job, not the one I interviewed for; I got a different job. So now I got the job. Who would ever dream that would happen? So my career 02:01:00-- well, I had two programs. One, I was over all the non-public schools. And non-public schools receive federal money. So I was over the Title I programs that were for low-achieving students. Most of them are Christian or Catholic schools, but some are nondenominational and some are not religious at all. So I had eleven Title I schools, and I was responsible for helping hire the staff, do staff development, help them develop a budget, write a school plan, do parent education, monitor budgets, whatever they ordered. I even had to go to the sites all the time and make sure there were no religious objects in the classroom where they were working. That was a really kind of fun, interesting job, because I had to learn about K-12 programs, which were not my background. So overnight, 02:02:00it was like, "Here's your eleven schools; here's your twenty-five Chapter II schools." "Well, what do you do?" "Well, here's a list of what you do, and goodbye and good luck." So that was really challenging. But I really liked the people I worked with. In fact, I saw one of the ladies, who's retired, about three weeks ago. I was in Albany crossing the street and somebody was talking to me, and I turned around and looked. And I haven't seen her for probably ten years or more. Yeah, it was amazing.REDMAN: Could you tell me what your thoughts are? I'm almost finished with my
questions, but I'm wondering if now -- there's been added attention back on these programs stemming back to World War II and looking at how innovative these programs were, and continued to be for many years after the war. You'd also 02:03:00mentioned how ahead of their time these programs were. I'm wondering now, do you think they're finally getting the recognition they're deserving? Or is it still something that's not recognized to the extent that it needs to be?FOGELSON: No, they're still not getting the recognition they deserve. If you
look at early childhood programs in California, which had some of the most and the strongest programs, whenever something has to be cut, if they're getting partially subsidized with an entitlement or any district monies, they're the first ones that they cut. No one seems to put together, in all the research that's been done that have followed students -- Initially, they used to follow them to third grade, and then their achievement would just kind of level off. But HighScope was one of the first ones that followed them to adulthood, and now 02:04:00they're testing the children of the children. They've probably already finished that research. It's so dramatic; how can anyone even question the value? It's only valuable if you have fully-trained, fully-credentialed teachers. Because I often say to people in management, would you hire someone to teach kindergarten that only had two years of college? No! Well, why is it okay for them to teach a three- or four-year-old? Because they're going to make more impact, the younger the child is.So it's really hard for people to understand, unless they go and see what we do
in early childhood education, that we are innovative, that we are ahead of our times and we do understand you can't just look at test scores to decide what kind of skills a child has, and that we're more successful in getting parents involved in our program and parent education than probably most other programs, with the exception of some charter schools that have been successful at doing 02:05:00that too, and that it's an opportunity to do some things and to begin to plant the seeds, before the child is already behind. Then they say, "I have to go to that special class," or, "Somebody has to come and work with me, a tutor, because I'm behind." Well, if people would put the energy and the money into education when children are younger, especially children that they already know -- because of their socioeconomic backgrounds, they are going to have more challenges, or because their primary language is not English. Hispanic students, once they become fully fluid in English, they score higher than other children. All other children. So people have these preconceived notions that certain ethnic groups are not capable of achieving as much. It's absolutely not true. 02:06:00So I never thought that in my lifetime I would see the United States elect an
African-American president. Never would I have believed that it would've happened. So when you start to see role models of people, all the way up to the top -- and it still hasn't happened in business. They have some token people in management. But in education, I think that it's different; we have people from multiple ethnic groups in all areas in education. But I think it's very unfortunate what people sometimes believe, and they don't have any factual information to confirm. Because some of the most talented people never have an opportunity, because people hold those kinds of beliefs.REDMAN: My final question is if you wouldn't mind looking back on your time as a
teacher, on your career in teaching, is there anything else that you'd like to 02:07:00add, by way of summary, in looking back on your career and those changes that you witnessed?FOGELSON: I think that it's being addressed now, that people in education, like
university professors and superintendents, much more now than when I was starting to teach, understand the importance of research, and that you should pick curriculums or reading programs or early childhood programs that are research-based, and that you have factual documentation that can demonstrate that they're successful with all kinds of students from all different socioeconomic backgrounds. And not just go to a workshop and say, "Oh, I saw a really good strategy today; I think I'm going to start using that at my school." 02:08:00Or, "Somebody brought a new reading program, and it looks really good, so I think we're going to buy all these books and spend a fortune and change the whole reading program in the school district." Then ask them, is it research-based? "Oh, I don't know. Do you have anything we could read about it, to show how successful it's been?" No. Or maybe they do; maybe they don't. But I think too many things happen haphazardly or because you just get a taste of something and it looks like it's going to work, but you don't spend the time delving into it.The other thing is that I don't think that the way that everybody's scheduled to
work -- there isn't enough overlap time or paid time, where people can collaborate. You can learn more from your peers than you can, probably, at some universities. And that if you have people on your site that are effectively 02:09:00teaching and changing kids' test scores, and the kids are excited about coming to school and they're going home every day and telling their parents about it, that if you provide that, that's one of the most important things that's missing all over the country, is that teachers and teachers' aides don't have enough time to do collaboration. Then if you have one child that you're having problems with, you can come up with strategies you're going to talk about when you go back to the classroom. You're going to all be on the same page. In the State Preschool Program, the aides only work three hours. So when they leave, the teacher takes her lunch break. Then when she's finished her lunch break, another class comes. And when you come in the morning, you're serving breakfast to the children. Not in the classroom at state preschool, but in the children's centers 02:10:00you're eating with them. The state preschool, they go and eat in the cafeteria. So if they pay them to work longer, then their contracts read they have to get health benefits. Not that I don't believe; I think everybody should have it. But the program isn't funded to pay for that. So there's not enough money to do that, which to me, is criminal because every person that works, I believe, should have health benefits, even if they have to pay a very small part of them. And I mean small, because they're so expensive now that some families don't have health benefits, because even though both parents are working, they can't pay for it.REDMAN: With that, I'd like to say thank you so much --
FOGELSON: Oh, you're welcome.
REDMAN: -- for sharing all of this information. I really appreciate it.
FOGELSON: Well, it's been fun.
REDMAN: Thank you.
[End of Interview]