Joyner Model School

The Joyner School was a three-room Pitt County school for white children for which ECTTS provided teachers in training between 1917 and 1923. When opened as a rural model school, the partnership between ECTTS and the Pitt County school was praised as the first in the state of North Carolina of its kind. Given ECTTS’s Jim Crow charter, no outreach effort was made in relation to African-American county schools. Within a few years, however, the rural model school arrangement ended as a newer trend, consolidation of county schools, progressed. Also, by late 1921, the Training School had been renamed East Carolina Teachers College with a new mission, offering a four-year degree program educating teachers intent on receiving the highest level of certification. While the more basic two-year curriculum remained, East Carolina’s new mission was increasingly geared toward superior levels of certification. Training in a three-room country school gradually became a thing of the past.

Unlike the Model School built on the ECTTS campus by the City of Greenville as a brand new facility for teacher training, the Joyner School was an old clapboard structure in an advanced state of disrepair. From the start, problems with sanitation and classroom conditions were noted by the school’s principal. Even with improved roads and automobile transport, the school was remote, several miles outside Greenville, in the midst of a farming community near Falkland. However, the Pitt County superintendent of schools, Sam B. Underwood, knowing of ECTTS’s interest in providing authentic teacher training in rural schools, proposed, in May of 1917, that ECTTS use the existing school facility for teacher training “along the same general lines of … [the] Model Graded School.” When the proposal was submitted to the ECTTS Board of Trustees on June 3, 1917, it carried unanimously. Upon learning of the board’s approval, Underwood declared the arrangement a “wonderful opportunity” for the county that would possibly lead to “strengthening of … the whole system.”

The school was known as the Joyner School in honor of James Yadkin Joyner, state superintendent of public education. Joyner was an advocate of teacher training for rural areas, especially in eastern North Carolina where illiteracy rates were high. At the time, the Joyner School was considered ideal because the N.C. Department of Education had identified three-room, three-teacher schools as a standard for country schools. When ECTTS began the relationship, there were thirty-six students at the Joyner School. That number soon increased to fifty-eight. The students were divided into primary, middle, and higher grades, each in its own room and with a specific teacher who in turn supervised teachers in training from ECTTS. The Joyner School also made Pitt County history by being the first serviced by a “school truck” transporting students from the Falkland area. Yet that same mode of transportation soon facilitated a shift away from the small country school toward larger consolidated facilities, making the Joyner School obsolete as a practice facility.

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Sources

• Bratton, Mary Jo. East Carolina University: The Formative Years, 1907-1982. Greenville: Alumni Association, 1986.
• “Joyner Model School.” University Archives # 55.01.0457. J. Y. Joyner Library. East Carolina University. Greenville, N.C. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/22926.
• School News: Opening of Joyner School.” Training School Quarterly. October, November, December, 1917. P. 277.
• “The First School Truck in Pitt County, Second in the State.” Training School Quarterly. October, November, December, 1917. Pp. 277-278.
• “The Joyner School: A Model Rural School.” Training School Quarterly. October, November, December, 1917. Pp. 196-198.
• “The Joyner School.” Eleventh Annual Catalogue of the East Carolina Teachers Training School, 1920-1921. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1921.
• “The Model Rural School.” Training School Quarterly. October, November, December, 1917. P. 231-232.

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