The pupils of the school are given social as well as educational opportunities through their school life. The boys’ club house is opened nearly every night to local boys’ clubs, some of them being school organizations and some independent ones. There are rooms for the boys to hold meetings and to play games, and a well-equipped gymnasium. The teachers of the school take turns supervising these evening gatherings. The attendance is large for the size of the building. Giving the boys a place for wholesome activities has done much to break up the habits of street loafing and the gangs which were so common in the district. The girls of the school use the domestic science house for social purposes. Two chapters of the Camp Fire girls hold regular meetings in the building and get help and advice from the teachers. Each domestic science class aims to teach the girls how to live a comfortable and self-respecting life, as well as how to do housework, and so becomes a social center of its own. The girls learn to cook and serve good cheap meals, and then they sit down together and eat what they have cooked. They talk over their individual problems with the teacher and with each other, and give each other much practical help. The domestic science teacher helps the girls who have some skill find work to do after school hours so that they can help their families by helping themselves; she helps the pupils find steady work as they leave school and then keeps track of them, encouraging them to go on fitting themselves for better work.
The success of the settlement work the school has done points strongly to the fact that the schoolhouse is the natural and logical social center in a neighborhood, the teachers coming into closer and more natural contact with both children and parents than is possible in the case of other district workers.
There are large economies combining the school and the settlement in districts where the social and economic standards of living are so low that the people are not especially successful citizens. Both the school and settlement facilities are enlarged by using the same group of buildings for both purposes. The settlement has the use of better and larger shops and classrooms than most settlements can command, and the school uses the social rooms and activities to become itself a community. The school comes in contact with almost all the families in a district so that community action is much easier to establish. But even more important than these economies are the far-reaching results which come from the fact that the school settlement is a democratic community, really reflecting the conditions of the community.