1960s era “health care” in the nursery school.
by Amy Gage
The University authorized its first laboratory, or “model,” school in 1905 along with its establishment of a college of education. A few of the regents objected, claiming that the work of a lab school—observing students at work and play, conducting research, training student teachers—would distract from the more exalted purposes of higher education.
Proponents of the lab-school concept persevered, to the everlasting gratitude of those who work in the college’s lab schools today. “We’ve always been mandated to accommodate research and provide opportunities for teacher training and community service,” says Patty Finstad, director of the University of Minnesota Child Care Center, which the Board of Regents authorized in 1974.
“We really are part of the University community,” she says.
Finstad’s successful center, with national awards for excellence, rests on an impressive foundation. Whether by foresight or happenstance, the early proponents of laboratory schools within a university setting laid groundwork for a nationally recognized model in which children are studied and valued equally, whatever their ages.
Model High School opened on Beacon Street in 1905 and was followed in 1925 by a laboratory nursery school (today’s Shirley G. Moore Lab School), in 1928 by an experimental kindergarten program, and in 1947 by a model elementary school. University High School, a highly regarded lab school for students in seventh through 12th grades, began its 14-year run in 1954.
“People were learning to be teachers there,” recalls Sunny Hansen, emerita professor of counseling and student personnel psychology who was a teacher and counselor at University High. “The high school had close connections with the University,” she says. “It was, in a sense, an experimental arm of the college where various kinds of research on educational issues could be done.”
That interest in young people of all ages, at all stages, has characterized the college from the start. When the Institute of Child Welfare (now the Institute of Child Development) was organized in 1925, what is now the Moore Lab School also was established. In addition to creating an “exemplary program,” its threefold mission included studying preschoolers from the viewpoints of psychology, sociology, medicine, and nutritional needs.
“The faculty people cared about it,” says Shirley Moore, who served as director from 1960 to 1979 and for whom the lab preschool is named. “When they hired me, I knew that the school had a reputation of being integrated, not isolated somewhere,” she explains, so she always fought to keep the school in the institute’s building, close to the researchers.
“Our staff and faculty really do see themselves as partners with the researchers,” says Lynn Galle, director of the lab school. “We are a research base.”
Since 1974, the lab school has had arrangements with local school districts to serve children with identified special needs. Ethnic diversity is a priority as well. Attention to demographics and diversity is key in a research-based school, as University High School learned the hard way. “A lot of the students [in the high school] were bright faculty kids,” says Hansen. “But there was concern that we didn’t have a representative enough student body.”
University of Minnesota Child Care Center today.
Former College of Education Dean Bill Gardner, who taught at University High from 1954 to 1960, contends that lack of diversity led to the school’s merger in 1968 with Marshall High School in Minneapolis and its eventual separation from the University.
“As a teacher there, I learned a tremendous amount,” he says. “The kids were fine students. There was a professor and two student-teachers in every classroom. But that’s very expensive. And if you’re going to do research on a teaching question, you need a random selection of the population.”
The lab-school legacy continues for younger children, both at the nursery school and at the child-care center, now housed in a custom-designed building near the East Bank campus. “Over the 30 years we’ve developed a program culture that people sense when they spend time with us,” says Finstad, the center director. “It’s the language of respect, the way teachers talk to children.”