Nine Fun Facts about the Martha's Vineyard Public Schools Superintendent's Office

On Sunday, June 11, Martha's Vineyard Public Schools superintendent James Weiss will address the Class of 2011 at the high school's graduation. His is a big job—but did you know that back in the day the island's superintendent was paid a pittance to oversee 17 schools? Martha's Vineyard Regional High School Chris Baer shares with Patch that, plus eight other amazing and quirky facts about the island's superintendency.  

1. The origin of the term “superintendent” may have roots right here on the island. The book "The Development of the City Superintendency of Schools in the United States" (Theodore Lee Reller, 1935) suggests that among the first known recorded uses of the word “superintend” in reference to a school was in the record of a 1797 town meeting in Tisbury “. . . to Choose Committes in the Several School districts in Sd town to provide masters for each destrict and to Superentend the Same…” 
2.  Before 1895, each town on the island had its own superintendent. The superintendent of the seven school districts of Tisbury from the 1840s until about 1880 was Abraham Anthony, who ran a tailor shop on Main Street across from the Mansion House.  
3. Seven school districts in Tisbury? Yes, each with its own schoolhouse: Holmes Hole South, Holmes Hole North, Northeast, Lambert’s Cove, Northwest, Southwest, and Southeast. 
4. The first island-wide Superintendent of Schools was Clifton Alden Snell of Edgartown, who served from 1895 until 1900. For an annual salary of $1,500, Snell oversaw all 17 public schools on the island, including two brand-new high schools: Tisbury High School (c.1895) and Cottage City High School (c.1896). Snell later went on to become the principal of Malden High School. 
5. Seventeen schoolhouses? Actually it was even more in the early and middle 1800s. But in Snell’s time, island schools included four in Edgartown (the North School, the South School, the Plains School, and the Chappaquiddick School), three in West Tisbury (Locust Grove School, Lambert’s Cove School, and the Center School) and three in Chilmark (the Menemsha School, the Cape Higgon School, and Chilmark School). 
6. Harvard graduate Andrew Preston Averill was our second superintendent from 1900—1912. His son Andrew A. Averill was later principal of the Edgartown School, and his grandson Preston Averill today owns Averill Distributing and Cash & Carry. 
7. Our third superintendent, Charles A. Crowell Jr. of Vineyard Haven, started a movement in the three island high schools away from “Classical” education (e.g. Latin, rhetoric), and toward “Practical” education (e.g. carpentry, home economics.) He also began a broad movement in 1916 for a county-wide, regional high school, which was to be named “Union High School.” 
8. Robert William Martin became our fourth superintendent in 1918. In his first few months as superintendent he was forced to close all island schools for a total of eleven weeks to prevent the spread of the Spanish Influenza, which killed 45,000 people in Massachusetts alone, including many on the island. A champion of “Union High School” who brought the issue to the floor of the State Legislature, it was to Martin’s great anger that Edgartown preemptively torpedoed the whole regionalization movement by voting in their own new high school in 1924, effectively ending the battle for almost 30 years. 
9. Arthur B. Lord was superintendent from the mid-1930s until 1952, followed by Chester V. Sweatt, who began a new, modest regionalization effort by hiring shared teachers who traveled from school to school, teaching specialized subjects such as Art, Music, French, Latin, and Girls’ Physical Education. It was his successor, Superintendent Charles E. Downs, who finally oversaw the opening of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School in September 1959.