As State Institutes Juvenile Courts, Compulsory School Attendance, New Sanitation and Road Laws, County Workers Get Training, Oct. 8, 1919

From the News and Observer, Raleigh, as reprinted in The University of North Carolina News Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., Oct. 8, 1919. Juvenile Courts, compulsory school attendance, new sanitation and road laws were all new in North Carolina, and all of the workers in these positions to enforce these laws are new.

New Welfare Tasks

There are more than a hundred juvenile court judges in the state, all of whom will be called upon to apply the modern principles of salvage and discipline to children in need of special care.

As many as possible of them will be on hand to hear the subject discussed by people who know and to ask scores of direct questions that puzzle them. The same is true of the 100 county superintendents of public welfare, upon whose good judgment, knowledge and devotion the success of the juvenile courts depend, as well as the enforcement of the compulsory school attendance law.

There is important new health legislation which will be gone over thoroughly. There are the many problems relating to county government, new school laws, new road laws, and the vastly important new tax laws.

Every one of these depends upon the mutual work of county and state officials. Here for the first time in the history of North Carolina, county and state officials will come together as such and in mass to advise, counsel, learn each other’s difficulties and ascertain what can be done for mutual helpfulness. 

Not only this, but it will put these people in close touch with the University and out of the first council others are certain to follow and eventually to give large expansion to various forms of university extension work.

It is to be a locking up and a tying together of workers and forces for groundwork development in the state, and the people of the state are to be congratulated upon its conception and its certain success.