Jim Bradshaw: 'Progressive education' brought open warfare

The Opelousas Daily World described  it as “open warfare” in 1954 after Robert Olivier, assistant principal at Washington High School, took on the education establishment  over so-called “progressive education.”
The argument became so heated that the school had to be closed for a week, Olivier lost his job, and the inevitable lawsuits dragged on for years.
Washington High Principal W. K. Baillio favored the new way of teaching.
So did St. Landry Superintendent Curry Couvillion. Olivier was dead set against it.
The fireworks started March 24 at the end of what had been a routine Parents’ Day program.
Several other teachers spoke on “teaching methods, results obtained, and how classwork is carried out,” and the meeting was about to adjourn when Olivier, who was not scheduled to speak, took the microphone to give heated  “opposition views to what he called progressive education,” the newspaper reported.
There was already a ripple of discontent in the community. The Catholic pastor, Father  Patrick Regan, had written a letter to the editor “charging that under … ‘progressive’ education very few students fail.” Superintendent Couvillion told the parents at the meeting that was “because the teachers took the time to help the lagging students.”
That was what the new method was all about, he said.
According to the newspaper account, Olivier argued that “if a pupil refuses to work, he should fail,” but “his talk ended abruptly when it appeared that local police officers might interfere … [because] there was considerable disturbance at the time.”
The whole issue came to a head at a school board meeting two days later when Olivier, who had been teaching for 30 years, was suspended “pending a dismissal hearing,” and two teachers who sympathized with him were fired.
The Daily World said that during a four-hour hearing that “almost erupted into fisticuffs between Olivier and member Garland L. DeJean,” board members heard “an amazing, almost unbelievable series of charges that Olivier … had deliberately organized [students] … to disrupt … [the classes] of other faculty members.”
Three hundred people went to a meeting at the Washington High gym that day to hear Olivier claim he had been “convicted by the school board before he had been tried.”
Also that day school board members met with Father Regan and a delegation of parents, but did not resolve the impasse. The board closed the school “pending a full investigation into recent friction and troubles.”
Early the next week, “with residents of the Washington community probably more divided than ever … and the school board faced with the probability of community trouble no matter what they do,” the state board of education was asked to intervene.
It wanted no part of the dispute, and declined.
Meanwhile, in a long session in Opelousas, the board accepted a request by Baillio for a transfer to another school and appointed Sidney Sylvester as the new Washington principal. The two teachers who had been fired were reinstated, but Olivier was not.
The school reopened on Monday, April 5, after “being closed for six school days during which raged one of the strangest and most heated disputes ever centered about a Louisiana public school,” the Daily World reported.
Classes ran smoothly, although only half of the school’s 334 students showed up.
But that wasn’t the end of it.  On Tuesday the school board charged Olivier with “willful neglect” of his duties and began proceedings to fire him.
Sheriff D. J. "Cat" Doucet himself acted as bailiff when “a near capacity crowd” filled a courtroom in Opelousas for the dismissal hearing, which dragged on for days.
Olivier defended himself in nearly four hours of testimony.
The legal wrangling continued for months after the hearing and it wasn’t until June 25 that the board finally voted 10-1 to fire Olivier.
He asked the board to reconsider.
The board said no. Olivier found a new job at the Academy of the Immaculate Conception in Opelousas, and sued the school board.
His lawyers and the board attorneys argued for three years before they finally reached a compromise.
The board voted 8-3 in June 1957 to accept a proposal that reinstated Olivier from the date of his dismissal in June 1954 and gave him $14,000 in back pay, but only if he would not return to the parish school system.
That was just fine with Olivier.
He continued teaching at AIC and later was named principal there.
When he died in 1986, his obituary made no mention of the hoopla, although he was described as “a well-known educator in Louisiana.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.