Newspapers / The University of North … / Nov. 17, 1926, edition 1 / Page 1
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The news in this publi cation is released for the press on receipt. THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA NEWS LETTER Published Weekly by the University of North Caro lina for the University Ex tension Division. NOVEMBER 17, 1926 CHAPEL HILL, N C. THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS V^OL. XIII, NO. 3 Eilltoria' Boardi K. C. Branson. S. H. Hobbs. Jr.. L. R. Wiiaon, E. \V. Knight. D. D. Carrol!. J. B. Bullitt. H. W. Odum. Entered as second-class matter November 14. 1914. at the Postoffice at Chapel Hill. N. C.'' under the act of Auguat 2i. 1912 IMPROVED COUNTY GOVERNMENT PHOPEK ACCOUNTING A Study of county government in thirty-odd counties of the state has re corded an astonishing deficiency in bookkeeping and accounting, though there is evidence of remarkable im provement in the }ast five years. The deficiency appears both in the records of receipts and in the records of expendi tures. In many counties the record of tax collections is limited to a record of deposits made by the tax collector. Quite often the latter does not know, even approximatei^, how much he owes the county until a final settlement is made. .The recprd of land sales, license taxes, lines, fees, etc., is quite often very incomplete and untrustworthy. The record of expenditures is slightly better, on the whole, than the record of receipts. The State Department of Public Instruction designed a ledger for school accounts which has been adopted in ninety or more of the counties. Nevertheless, some superintendents of schools display a surprising faculty for getting their accounts confused. The disbursements from the county’s Gen eral Fund are usually recorded with some thoroughness but (^uite often without classification. Rarely is there a double-entry system of accounts used The character of accounting practiced by the highway boards varies from ex cellent to no records at all. One road board when invited to submit a report of money turned over to it issued the laconic statement that it had “spent it all.” ' Board in the Darh It is not uncommon for a new ad ministration to come into office and find no intelligible record of bonded indebt edness, or of current indebtedness, or of uncollected taxes, or of tax sales, or of total Assets and liabilities. Some times there are half a dozen ex-office holders owing more or less uncertain balances to the county. Sometimes there are interest payments overpaid and others past due and unpaid. Sometimes there is a considerable volume of out standing claims the authenticity of which is in doubt. The commissioners find themselves completely in the dark as to the financial condition of the county, and generally they go out of office leaving their successors just as much in the dark. The-lack of systematic bookkeeping has many serious results besides the handicap to the commissioners. It permits and encourages fraudulent en tries or unreasonable charges. It leaves an official uncertain as to his obligations to the county, encourages him to over draw and then attempt to conceal the shortage. It makes an audit expensive and sometimes meaningless. It pre vents an effective analysis of disburse ments and a study of unit costs. It consigns county government to a per manent low level of efficiency, for, in the words of Dr. Branson, “No govern ment can rise above the level of its bookkeeping. ’’ Control Accounts Even those county, officers who keep their books with a degree of care usu ally limit their efforts to a cash record. In fact that is all that the present laws governing county finances require. But with the increased volume and com plexity of county finances this is entirely inadequate. A statement of receipts and disbursements throws little light on the financial condition of a county or the soundness of its opera tions. Cash receipts are not revenues and disbursements are not expenses. Sound financing requires a proper bal ancing of income and expenses, and such control accounts as will enable the commissioners to know the status of all funds at all times. An adequate system of control accounts substitutes enlightenment for bewilderment in the conduct of county business, and it throws security rather than temptation around the individual officer. Uniform Accounting There is also a need for more uni formity in accounting among the coun ties of the state. This is desirable for at least three reasons. First, it would permit comparison. Secondly, it would increase the accuracy of the state re ports. In the third place, it would simplify and reduce the cost of auditing. How useful it would be if our hundred counties submitted annual statements that were comparable item by item! It might stimulate a healthy competition in efficiency and economy. Auditors Needed | It is useless, however, to talk about! the value of double-entry bookkeeping, I control accounts . and uniformity of ac counting systems unless there be pro vided in every courthouse an official who is qualified to keep such accounts. A scientific system of bookkeeping need be no more difficult nor complicated : than a haphazard system. In fact, it may be simpler. It is necessary, how ever, fhat the bookkeeper understand the rudiments of accounting. A person of ordinary intelligence can learn enough i accounting in six weeks to keep a set of county books in excellent shape. Yet two-thirds of the counties are content to stumble along in the dark, pay huge sums for audits, and suffer frequent losses through defalcations, all because of inadequate bookkeeping. A compe tent auditor or bookkeeper in every courthouse will go a long way toward making county government efficient. It will not prevent the commissioners from acting unwisely at times, but it will at least prevent them from acting blindly. —Paul W. Wager. MY LITTLE TOWN .Iniir I.ut'-ln.-U p.l.lui My little town, that has not yet at tained The height and breadth of cities, oh, stay small! What profit is Ih** vastness they have gained. Their strength of stone and steel: when, growing tall. They lose the singing company of leaves; And growing wide, they have no room for grass; No rose-vines reaching for contented eaves, No space to watch the seasons as tliey pass. No lure have cities to entice a thrush, Nor yards for children, carpeted and sweet; With.all their pride and gaiety and - rush, They bear the burden pf a million feet. You have your gardens, friendliness, and trees— My little town, be satisfied with these. BUBAL WHITE SCHOOL TERM One hundred percent of the white ! XT tT X 1- 1 ' children in our city schools are provided ' New Hanover county has the longest -xi. • , , , , ^ 'jviucu ; . , i with a nine months’school term, while school term of any county in the state. | o^ly slightly more than half of the rural In New Hanover county all the children, I white children are provided with as rural and city, white and colored, have ; Biuch as an eight months’ .school term, an opportunity to attend school one j Eor twenty-five years in North Garo- hundred and eighty days during each | children, both white and : school year. i ‘''“I **'“ oPP'X'tunity to I attend school for eight months or more : Six counties, New Hanover, Curri-, ^^ile the average rural white child has : luck, Edgecombe, Pamlico, Vance, and , never had as much as a seven months’ Wilson provide a school term of eight! term. months, 160 days, or more for ail rural ' white children. Twenty-four counties provide seventy- five percent or more of their rural white children with at least an eight months’ ; school term. Thirteen counties provide less than twenty-five percent of their r.ural white children with an eight months’ term or more. The table which appears elsewhere shows the average length of term in days for the rural white schools of each county, and the percent of rural white children enrobed in schools having a term of one hundred and sixty days, or eight months, or more. The educa'tional oppo'tunities of the city children of the .state are fairly uni form, at least in so far as length of In twenty-nine counties the average [ school term is concerned. But for the length 0^ term of rural white schools is : rural children conditions are about as less than one hundred and thirty days, diverse as could possibly be imagined, or less than ten days above the, mini- The accompanying table tells only a I mum state requirement. ^ part of the story of the unequal educa- [ All white children in the city schools tioual opportunities in the different I have an opportunity to attend school -counties of the state. The counties I for one hundred and eighty days or nine vary more widely in the quality of ^months in the year, while the colored teachers, and in value of l^hool property ■ ' ' 1 children in the city schools lack only | per child enrolled, than they vary in i ^ i about a week of having a nine months’ ' length of school term. The most char- . like Riis we could clean our New York i sqhool term. The rural schools on the : acteristic fact about public education FLY-BY-NIGHTS The phrase is Roosevelt’s, applied by him to farm tenants who as a class squat .for a season or two, mine the fertility of rented farms, and, then move on to other farms in other communities or other counties, as though cursed with the restless foot of The Wandering Jew. But also it applies to the tenants and renters of our towns and cities. Forty-two percent of the families in one of our largest cities change their water-meter addresses annually, says the National City Bank of New York in a recent business letter to the public. Almost entirely they are tenants liv ing in apartment houses and teriements. This ratio of changing water-meters is not surprising when one considers that eighty-nine percent of the dwellings in New York City are occupied by renters while only eleven percent are occupied by owners. The more populous and prosperous an area becomes the fewer are the people who live in homes of their own. It is the cruelest paradox of Christendom. The penalty we pay for what we are pleased to call modern civilization is ‘ ‘going up and down some body else’s stairs like poor Dante.’’ Such a fact as the National City Bank recites ought to provoke earnest think ing about the social and civic signifi cance of landless, restless, roving, irre sponsible citizenship. The city tenant has little chance and little impulse to become identified with either the neigh borhood or the city in which he lives, to feel any particular civic pride in it or any responsibility for its law and order, or to relate himself to the nearby church and Sunday school, or to be actively concerned about the moral contamina tions of his community. He has even less chance to rear his children in safety, that is to say, if his wife chooses to bear children. Preserving the integrity of home life is the supreme social prob lem of our great cities. A deadly menace to modern- civiliza tion lies in the instable, irresponsible citizenship produced by incessant changes, of residence. It gives full license to almost every social and civic evil in America—moonshining and boot legging, gangs and gunmen, wicked graft and stupid waste of public moneys, indifference to elections, venal voting, ballot-box stuffing, increasing divorce rates, the abandonment of families, the disappearance of boys and girls in our cities, and so on and on. Runaway children in their teens have averaged more than one a day during the last year in Durham alone. And the ratio is almost the same in Winston-Salem. Robert Fulton Cutting said to the man sitting next to him at a banquet given in honor of Jacob Riis some years ago, “If we had two dozen real citizens stables in any fortnight of the year, j What New York lacks is robust, two- fisted citizenship. Apparently nobody living in big cities bothers much about anything but profits, dividends, rents, wages, taxes, and elections.” Good Men, Poor Citizens A little while ago I was guest of a business man in New York City. His offices occupied an entire floor of the Hanover Bank Building. At that time he was living in the Bronx. How long have you been living here? said I. Ob, about a year, was the response. How long have you been doing business in New York City? Twelve years, he said, and I have move^ thirteen times. I’ve zigzagged from Brooklyn to the Bronx and from New Jersey to Long Island exactly a baker's dozen times during other hand are open an average of less | in North Carolina is the lack of uni- than one hundred and thirty-eight days | formity in any particular, and especially for the white children and 123.4 days for I is this true of the rural schools.— the colored children. ; S. H. H., Jr. AVERAGE LENGTH OF TERM OF RURAL WHITE SCHOOLS Percent in Schools Having Term of 160 days or more, 1924-25 In the following table, based on State School Facts, Volume II, No. 11, the counties are ranked according to khe percent of rural school children enrolled in Hiral white schools having a term of 160 days or more. The parallel column shows the average length of term in days* of the rural white schools in each county. New Hanover ranks first. In that county all children, rural and city, white and black, have an opportunity to attend school 180 days during each year. Only 8.1 percent of the rural wiiife children of Yancey county have the opportunity of an eight month.s’ school term. The rural white schools of Rowan county average the shortest term in days with 120. (Salisbury schools, white and negro, average 177 days.) Only 53.6 percent of the rural white children are enrolled in schools with as theTe" twelvryea(s.''”what d7ybu know j months' term, while all city schools have an average term of j nine months. The rural white schools average 137.9 days, the city white schools I all run nine months. • I Department of Rural Social-Economics. University of North Carolina. about the new borough organization up here in the Bronx, I asked. Not one blessed thing, except that nobody is in in order to get their fingers into the city treasury, said he. But oughtn’t you to be interested in it? I asked. Why should I? I’m moving next May to White Plains, was his answer. The friendly conversation after dinner disclosed the fact that he had neve] been identified with any church in al his wanderings since he left his Southern home, that the children had never been to Sunday school, and that he and his wife had been to church fewer than a dozen times in thirteen years. ' He is a typical example of what is common in our cities—namely, a thor oughly fine man but a thoroughly poor citizen, and so because of instable, rov ing citizenship. It is not likely that he of a New York home. Nearly nine- tenths of the inhabitants of-New York are tenants and renters; on an average more than two of every five move every year and therefore have almost no chance to become identified with their j 20 neighborhood or their city. Almost cer tainly they have the feeble sense of civic responsibility that sojourners have in the local affairs of every land under Heaven. Landlessness and Crime In round numbers, eighty percent of all the crime in our rural regions is committed by tenants and renters, and even a larger proportion of city crime is committed by these landless, home less, restless, roving multitudes. They are 1,700,000 in North Carolina, black and white, town and country, and 56,- 0b0,000 in the United States! It is a great American problem, this problem of home ownership. Civilization is no longer based on the wide-spread ownership of homes and farms, but on wages, profits and interests, official salaries and the like sources of income. The shift is from the ownership of land to the ownership of secondary wealth- stocks, bonds and other instruments of i credit. It is safe to say that the share of stock has changed the essential nature of human nature as fundament ally as any other invention of modern times.—E. C. Branson. 1 Average Percent Average Percent length in schools length in schools Rank County of term having Rank County of term having ‘ , in days term of in days term of 160 days 160 days or more or more 11 New Hanover... 180 100.0 51 Polk ... 134 67.0 ; 1 Currituck ... 181. 100.0 52 Stanly ... 136 66.3 i 1 Edgecombe... ... 16l' 100.0 53 Alamance ., ... 130 55.6 1 1 Pamlico ... 160 100.0 54 Person ... 127 55.3 ! 1 Vance .. 160 100.0 55 Anson ... 144 65.0 ' 1 Wilson .. 150 100.0 66 Columbus .. ... 145 52.8 i 7 Durham .. 160 94.3 67 Haywood.... ... 136 62.3 i ^ Guilford .. 153 94.1 58 Pender ... 144 61.1 9 Halifax ... 157 89 8 59 Moore .... 133 60.3 4o Camden . 160 89.6 60 Union ... 140 49.9 Avery . 165 89.0 61 Henderson. ... 136 49.7 '12 Scotland .. 160 85.2 62 Swain ... 136 48.8 13 Cumberland... .. 150 83.3 63 Lee ... 132 48.2 14 Gaston .. 159 83.2 64 Davidson,... ... 130 47.0 15 Washington . ... 150 82.7 65 Franklin .... ... 140 45.9 16 Buncombe .. 142 81.9 66 Clay ... 134 45.0 17 Pasquotank... .. 143 81.3 67 Chatham.... ... 127 44.3 18 Mecklenburg .. 158 80.7 68 Graham ... 137 40.6 19 Hertford 141 80.5 69 Beaufort....... 127.. 39.7 20 Warren .. 146 79.7 69 Lincoln ... 131 39.7 21 Gates .. 132 77.8 71 Sampson .... ... 129 39.1 21 Richmond .. 165 77.8 72 Madison ... 130 38.7 23 Chowan . 150 77.2 73 Duplin ... 126 38.3 24 Translyvania. .. 146 76.0 74 Tyrrell ... 125 36.6 26 Hyde .. 146 73.6 76 Rowan ... 120 36.1 26 Craven .. 137 73 1 76 Alexander.. ... 123 35.2 27 Hoke .. 142 •. 72.9 77 Cleveland.... ... 125 33.6 28 McDowell .. 142 72.0 78 Cabarrus ... 136 33.6 28 Robeson .. 133 72.0 79 Johnston ... 137 33.4 30 Catawba .. 137 69.8 80 Cherokee.... ... 124 32.4 31 Wayne .. 136 69.0 81 Caldwell ... 124 32.1 32 Nash .. 166 68.9 82 Harnett ... 125 31.7 33 Bertie .. 147 68.2 83 Greene ... 136 30.5 34 Jackson .. 136 67.6 84 Onslow ... 125 30.4 35, Pitt .. 154 67.3 86 Burke .. 124 28.3 36 Rockingham.. .. 131 67.3 86 Brunswick.. 126 28.0 37 Forsytjh .. 130 66.7 87 Randolph .. 133 26.0 38 Northampton .. 142 64.6 88 Ashe ... 124 21.9 89 Jonhs .. 134 64.3 89 Stokes .. 123 21.7 40 Carteret .. 134 63.0 89 Watauga .. 124 21.7 41 Martin .. 133 62.2 91 Alieghanv .. .. 124 20.7 41 Montgomery.. .. 183 62.2 92 Mitchell ... 127 19.0 41 Wake .. 146 62.2 93 Wilkes ... 123 '. 17.9 44 Lenoir .. 149 61.3 94 Caswell .. 122 17.3 46 Dare .. 139 61.1 95 Yadkin .. 124 16.0 46 Davie . 126 60.7 96 Surry .. 123 16.3 47 Granville .. 149 60.6 97 Iredell .. 126 13.2 48 Rutherford ... .. 129 59.3 98 Macon., .. 132 12.8 49 Orange .. 129 68.9 99 Perquimans. .. 126 10.1 50 Bladen .. 140 67.7 100 Yancey .. 132 8.4
The University of North Carolina News Letter (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Nov. 17, 1926, edition 1
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