inics or other established agencies.

d. Effort to secure proper physical surroundings of children
while at school--playgrounds, baths, etc.

2. _Effort to secure establishment of such a system of school
records and reports_ as will disclose automatically significant
school facts,--e.g. regarding backward pupils, truancy,
regularity of attendance, registered children not attending,
sickness, physical defects, etc.

3. _Effort to utilize available information regarding school needs_
so as to stimulate public interest and thus aid in securing
adequate appropriations to meet school needs.

The committee grew out of the discussion, in the year 1905, of the
following proposition: _To insure a race physically able to receive our
vaunted free education, we must provide at school free meals, free
eyeglasses, free medical and dental care._ Thanks to the
superintendent of schools of New York City, to Robert Hunter's
_Poverty_, to John Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_, hundreds of
thousands of American citizens were made to realize for the first time
that a large proportion of our school children are in serious need of
medical, dental, or ocular attention, or of better nourishment.

Because physicians, dentists, oculists, hospitals, dispensaries, relief
agencies, had seemingly been unconscious of this serious state of
affairs, they had no definite, constructive remedy to propose. Their
unpreparedness served to strengthen the arguments for the European
method of _doing things_. France, Germany, Italy, England, had found it
necessary to do things at school. Arguing from their experience, it was
only a matter of time when American cities must follow their example.
Why not, therefore, begin at once to deal radically with the situation
and give school meals, school eyeglasses, etc.? Those who organized the
Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children realized the
danger of trying to settle so great a question with the little definite
information then available. If _doing things at school_ were to be
adopted as a principle and logically carried out, vast sums must be
added to the present cost of the public school system. Complications
would arise with private and parochial schools, whose children might
have quite as serious physical defects, even though not educated by
public funds. It would be difficult to obtain proper rooms for medical
and dental treatment and meals, and perhap