Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

40 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 3 purposes. Radio programs, records, transcriptions, and scripts are offered the schools by the Department of Radio Education. The Department of Visual Education limits its service to projected visuals. The Children’s Museum, a unit entirely supported and run by the Board of Education, offers an extension service for the schools, as well as providing exhibits and organized activities for individuals coming to the building. Approximately 20,000 persons visited the museum during the past year. Although wartime transportation restrictions have reduced class visits to the museum, such field trips were at one time a significant portion of the department’s service to teachers and will become so again. Only two of the eight rooms of exhibits are permanent in nature. The others are changed periodically throughout the school year, offering exhibits correlating closely with certain phases of the curriculum of the schools. Care of the building and provision of materials for schools is the full-time job of the museum’s staff of thirteen. The extent of the lending service can be judged by the fact that during the school year 1944-45, over 325,000 items were sent to schools to meet the more than 11,500 requests from teachers for exhibits and materials. The Department of Radio Education is responsible for the production of five programs weekly, one of which is broadcast from each of the commercial stations in Detroit. The Department is also in charge of the auditory-aids library, which at present lists in excess of 4,700 records, albums, and transcriptions. A script library also has been developed by the Department, so that teachers may re ceive sets of scripts for school productions. This newest unit of materials in the Department now circulates more than 1,700 scripts, which range from fourth-grade level to productions suitable for adults. Practically all of these scripts have been written by Department staff writers and correlate closely with the curriculum. The types of projected visuals circulated by the Department of Visual Education are silent and sound motion pictures, slides, slidefilms, and demonstration kits. Although it is probable that the Department will continue to circulate motion-picture films from a central library, experimentation is now being carried out to test the advisability of individual school libraries of basic sets of slides and slidefilms. In one of the larger high schools, also, an individual school library of motion pictures has been developed to determine the increased benefits accruing from such an arrangement. Service routines concerned with equipment, repair, booking, inspection, shipping, and delivery are the responsibility of the Department o f Audio-Visual Service, a unit of the Business Department of the Board of Education. The other three departments mentioned are units within the Division of Instruction. Delivery of audio-visual materials is made to all schools four times each week. An additional day will soon be added, so that Detroit teachers may again receive materials on any and every school day. During the 1944-45 school year, the daily average of audiovisual items delivered to schools was 2,835. The broadcasts of the Department of Radio Education, of course, are not counted in this figure, even though one might argue that each of the 254 public schools in Detroit receive them each day. Nor does the figure include those persons and groups who come to the Children’s Museum each day. But quantity is often a poor standard of evaluation, and circulation figures alone are not to be stressed. Detroit administrators strive to make effectiveness of use match breadth of utilization. No. 37: Doris Louisa Lynn Doris Louisa Lynn, Director of Visual Education at Indianapolis, was born October 6, 1903 in Indianapolis. She is the greatgrand-daughter of one of the pioneer judges and lawmakers of Indiana. She was graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1921. She received the A.B. and A.M. degrees from Butler University and has done graduate work at Chicago, Columbia, and Indiana Universities. She taught first in suburban Chicago and was made an elementary-school principal at the end of her fourth year there. After serving as principal for seven years. Miss Lynn returned to Indianapolis to teach. In 1940 she was assigned by the Board of School Commissioners to be the Teacher in Charge of Group Instruction Service at the Children’s Museum, where for two years thousands of children were brought for class instruction utilizing museum exhibits. In 1942, upon the retirement of Miss Carrie Francis, Director of Visual Education for the public schools. Miss Lynn was appointed to take over that work. Visitations to the Children’s Museum have been limited in recent years by transportation curtailments, but Miss Lynn is again stimulating out-of-school visitations to it and to the John Herron Museum of Art. Wilbur