Franklin No Longer Mann's World

Horace Mann, doubtless the most famous individual to claim Franklin as a birthplace, is best known as the "father" of the American public education movement and of the nation's state teacher colleges (most now grown into universities). He was also a prominent voice for the abolition of slavery, a sympathizer of the women's movement, a reformer in the treatment of the mentally ill, a state representative, Congressman, attorney and college president. For more than a 120 years, his name also graced at least one school in his home town.

That all changed recently when the school committee decided to consolidate all three middle schools into one, eliminating the names of all those schools, including the one named for Horace and located on Oak Street. It was a fairness argument. If the schools must be consolidated, it would be unfair for one of them to survive with its name intact.

Fair enough. The school consolidation and budget challenges have presented immense challenges to the Committee and the school administration.

Still, for many Franklinites, those things did not seem sufficient reason to simply cancel Horace. So, several weeks ago, in a  unanimous vote, the Historical Commission agreed to write to the School Committee and Administration to express concern if not in fact outright disapproval of this erasure of history, writing in part, "if the Horace Mann Middle School must ‘die’ perhaps Mann
himself could be resurrected as the name of a building complex or, better yet, as the name for the High School itself As you may be aware, the first public Franklin High School building, dating to the 1890s, was the Horace Mann School, a name which the structure retained after the High School moved to the new Davis Thayer building, and when it was later used for lower grades."

This week, in correspondence signed by every member, the Town Council took a similar tack: 

While it is not known whether the School Committee has yet responded to the Council letter, Chair David Callaghan did attend the March meeting of the Historical Commission to listen and take feedback and has also invited the Commission to present its concerns at next weeks Policy Subcommittee meeting.