Junction School

Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on 11 April 1965 at a picnic table on the lawn of the one room schoolhouse where he had started school fifty three years earlier, and he asked his first teacher to sit beside him while he did it. Kate Deadrich Loney had taught him in 1912, when he was four years old. He lasted only a few months of that term before a whooping cough epidemic closed the school early, and the family moved to Johnson City before the next school year began. The signing was staged outdoors rather than in the classroom, at twenty past four in the afternoon, and among those Johnson named in his remarks were Senator Eugene McCarthy, Representative Carl Albert, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Education Commissioner Francis Keppel.

The school opened on 21 November 1910, on two and three quarter acres that John Pehl had sold for the purpose eight weeks earlier. Neil Murphy taught the first class of forty six children, and a school had served the same stretch of the Pedernales since the 1882 term, first from a tent a mile east. It ran for thirty seven years and closed in the spring of 1947, consolidated into Stonewall. Gillespie County once had thirty one one room schools, and only the school at Doss still holds class.

The act authorised roughly 1.3 billion dollars, most of it for Title I by the Center for the Study of Federalism's accounting, and it passed the House 263 to 153. Six major federal education bills became law in the century between Lincoln and Kennedy. More than sixty passed under Johnson.