WILL AID LOCAL SCHOOLS

Following a meeting between Cambridge school principals and officials of the University at the offices of Mr. Fitzgerald, superintendent of the Public School Association, it was announced yesterday that the University would offer instruction to a large number of Cambridge school children who are at present out of school on account of the coal shortage. The buildings in which the instruction is to take place are the Fogg Art Museum and the University Museum.

In the former the curator, E. W. Forbes '95, has volunteered to give instruction about the art collections to such school teachers as the superintendent may nominate, and the teachers in turn, will be invited to go to the Museum, with from 20 to 25 pupils to each teacher, and to hand on the instruction which they have received from Mr. Forbes.

At the University Museum Professor W. W. Atwood has held for the past two years extension classes for Cambridge children. The suggestion now is to extend this instruction to include from 400 to 500 children, four or five days each week. Furthermore, the instruction will be given by members of the Museum staff, assisted by State teachers, who are specialists in bird-life and forestry. The courses, briefly, will be on "nature studies," and the children most benefitted by them will be mainly from the fourth through the seventh grades of grammar school.

Co-operation With Mayor Quinn.

These extension courses are the results of an effort on the part of the Cambridge Public School Association, in co-operation with Mayor Quinn, to bring the teachers and pupils together and thus to avoid the present waste of time brought about by the general closing of public schools during the coal crisis. Several thousand children in Cambridge below the eighth grade have been enjoying an enforced vacation during the past two weeks because there is no coal to heat their school buildings.

As a result, also, of yesterday's meeting the seventh grade pupils of several schools will return to their desks, while still other lower grade pupils will be accommodated in the Central Library, the North Cambridge branch library, the East Cambridge branch library, and certain other school halls. The plans as completed yesterday will put approximately 4,000 more children under school discipline, or its equivalent, and a great many of the remaining 8,000 will profit by the instruction to be offered at the University