Ybor City Tape

Wilson interview

 19


 an arts and crafts thing over there. I put in a homemaking

 unit at

M: You say about 75% of the children were not Spanish?

W: No, were speaking enough English to get along.

M: Oh, it wasn't quite as bad as Ybor City.

W: No, in '41. Well, let's see, this, it was ten years dif-

 ference there.

M: But how was Ybor City ten years later? Ybor Elementary School.

W: I think we had one or two chart classes, what we called op-

 portunity classes. Instead of four.

M: So things had pretty much died down by then?

W: Yeah, well, they had become more English-speaking, let's put

 it that way. The ones that we had that didn't speak English,

 we'd put in those classes to start them off, the chart classes or

 opportunity classes. We had chart classes for the first ones, then

 we had some opportunity classes for fourth or fifth or sixth--

 the kids who now would be classified as special education stu-

 dents, mentally retarded or educationally retarded; it's hard

 to tell which it was back in those days. In fact I claim

 most mental retardation is educational retardation, rather

 than mental. Although there are some that ...

M: By that you mean they don't have an education or.,.

W: They just didn't have any educational background. And they come

 up to the level that you had up there.