COFO Seeks Teachers For Freedom Schools

The Council of Federated Organizations has begun a drive to recruit 100 more volunteers to teach a three-week session in Mississippi Freedom Schools, beginning Aug. 2. The new recruits will work in communities now without Freedom Schools.

These 100 volunteers will bring the number of Northern civil rights workers in Mississippi to 650, and will increase the Freedom School teaching staff by 50 per cent.

The new teachers are being recruited only in New York, Boston Philadelphia and Washington, according to Thomas Whaman, co-ordinator of the Freedom Schools. Ten people signed up in Washington on Wednerday. Whaman said, however, that it is too early to estimate whether COFO will reach its goal.

Whaman said that the "tremendous demand "for Freedom Schools from Negroes throughout Mississippi had prompted COFO's decision to expand the program. "I don't think anyone expected the response we've gotten," he said.

Increasing "Self-Awareness"

He attributed the response to increasing "self-awareness" among Southern Negroes. "They've never had anything like the courses we're teaching in Negro history and citizenship," he said.

COFO had wanted to maintain a 5-1 student-teacher ratio, Whaman said, but so many Negroes have enrolled that the ratio is nearer 10-1. There are 200 teachers for the 1900 pupils in the state.

Original plans called for two three-week sessions. The 100 volunteers will simply expand the second session. About half of them will work in Jackson. An additional school will also be established in the dangerous south-western part of the state; there are two in that region now.

A short training session, beginning July 31, will be held in "an Eastern city," Whaman said; COFO officials are now negotiating or facilities. He said that Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where the first group of volunteers aws trained, has already been engaged by another group.