If some of Utah's education controversies of the late 19th century were served up to state leaders today, they'd think they were fresh off the griddle.
Education is in a constant state of evolution, but some Utah issues have been around in one form or another for a century or more.For instance, today's Utah legislators who are wrestling with questions of school fees, waivers, accessibility for the poor and related matters could be hearing arguments by Jacob S. Boreman, who was state education commissioner in the late 1880s.
He was incensed that some Utah children were publicly labeled "indigent" and urged that laws including the term be dropped from the books. Every school board should "furnish all pupils with necessary books, slates, paper, ink, pens and such like articles" without consideration of their family finances, he said.
Boreman also was concerned about the potential abuse of school trust lands. Congress had granted two sections in each 36-section township for support of the public schools in the territory (expanded to four sections per township at statehood).
In his 1890-91 report to the Territorial Legislative Assembly, Boreman reported that some people were seeking patents to acquire the lands, which were potentially valuable for minerals.
"I am feeling a deep anxiety to prevent, if possible, the lands being lost to the territory for school purposes," Boreman said. A lawyer, he volunteered his own time to follow the legal process to protect the lands and was able to "forestall some transfers," he reported.
More than 100 years later, in the winter of 1994, the Utah Legislature passed a voluminous bill designed to improve administration of the school trust lands. The bill aimed to remove the administration from the pressures of politics and special interests which, some felt, were diminishing the value of the lands for education.
And Gov. Mike Leavitt would be in full sympathy with Superintendent J.R. Park, who headed education during the transition period between territorial status and statehood.
Park was concerned that patchwork elementary-school-level requirements and curricula become fully consistent and that high schools be established throughout the state to create a smooth path from kindergarten to college. Leavitt calls his modern version of the same concept a "seamless" system that allows students to move freely among educational levels at their own pace.
Even before Park came along, Superindendent L. John Nuttall decried the lack of preparatory schools in Utah that went beyond eighth grade and proclaimed that such schools should be "coordinate parts of one common system."
And for anyone who supposes that friction between states and the federal government is a new invention, there is the statement of John Taylor, dating back to 1877, that Congress should provide more financial help for education in "our feeble, struggling territory." Many of Utah's state legislators today have the same frustration with federal mandates that come without the cash support to make them work.