Our homeschool notebook: Book sharing Monday: Children of the Dustbowl

Monday, March 29, 2021

Book sharing Monday: Children of the Dustbowl

There are so many fascinating books that we come across for school reading and this is one of them. This particular book was on the reading list for Aric's co-op class studying the World War 2 era. I read this as well because it just looked interesting. It was!

This is a story about farmers and their families from the panhandle of Oklahoma, called "Okies." They left Oklahoma for California for what they thought would be a better life because their farms were failing due to weather and economic problems. They heard that California had jobs and land they could work with. Only when they arrived they found neither of those things to be the case. There were no jobs, and the locals didn't want them there. The children suffered in the schools from bullying because they were so poor and lived in homeless camps.

One man decided to make a difference and started up a special school where these kids could learn valuable life skills and become something more than the teachers and kids at the public schools said they'd be, always poor and dumb. The school was built by volunteers and the kids, and many donations. Weedpatch Camp school became a thing to be proud of for the kids and a place where they could feel proud of who they were.

The school was shut down after about 4 years. But, right before the school was closed parents from the other schools were looking to get their non-"Okaie" kids into it because it had gained a lot of popularity. The local school district that didn't want the poor "Okie" kids in their classrooms, in the beginning, decided that they should be integrated back into the schools now.

Both the superintendent and the principal had their own kids enrolled in the school. They also had a real airplane that the kids had a chance to drive down a runway if they did well in their arithmetic.