Mary Harmon Weeks’ major contributions to early Kansas City schools

By Diane Euston 

  When the Town of Kansas was incorporated in 1850 and reincorporated as the City of Kansas in 1853, there was little foresight to the foundations of governance or how the city would eventually grow. Education was limited to private schools and the home, and only the wealthier citizens were able to send their children off to higher learning far away from the western border of the United States.

  It would take over a decade after the city reincorporated for a formal talk on public schools to emerge. And when public schools opened in 1867, one principal and one teacher led the way at the city’s only high school.

  Mary Harmon was practically a child herself when she was selected to educate teenagers – some of which were older than she was. Her early role in the public school system as well as her ongoing advocacy for children across the country make Mary Harmon Weeks one of the most important child advocates of Kansas City’s history.

Mary Harmon’s Early Life

  Born in Warren, Ohio in 1851 to parents Charles R. Harmon and Mary Hezlep, Mary Harmon’s childhood began in a small town where her father for a time worked as a horse dealer. She was the youngest of three children, joining twin brothers Ellis and William (b. 1849). 

  Mary developed a love of the classics through her parents. When she was a small child, they would act out Shakespeare’s plays “as they washed the dishes.”  

  But this happy childhood was short-lived. When the Civil War broke out, her father joined the 24th Ohio Infantry where he rose to the rank of 1st Lieutenant. While fighting in the Battle of Stones River, Lt. Harmon was struck in the head with a bullet, killing him instantly on the first day of a three-day battle on December 31, 1862. 

  Due to the large number of casualties (2,971) on both sides, Mary’s father was buried in “as good a box as they could make under the circumstances.” He was interred in a garden of wild roses two and a half miles from Murfreesboro, Tenn.

  The way in which 11-year-old Mary Harmon found out about her father’s death stuck with her for her entire life. She overheard two neighbors discussing the death of her father just weeks after one of her twin brothers, Ellis, had died. At the time, “her mother was then seriously ill, fatigued by nursing [her brother],” the Kansas City Times later reported. “It was decided not to tell the mother of her husband’s death.” 

  For two days, Mary kept silent about the loss of her father.

  An event such as this likely impacted Mary for the rest of her life, but the course she took despite the tragedy is notable. She continued her education with her mother at the helm, and by 1867, her mother, surviving brother, William and Mary relocated to Kansas City.

  Once the sixteen-year-old arrived, she attended the old St. Teresa’s Academy and lived “in an old barrack building used by Union troops in the Civil War.” At just 17 years old, she turned toward a career in education.

The First Decade of the School System

  Kansas City steadily grew to be the most populous town on the western border, fueled in part by the settlement of Kansas Territory. The city grew to a population of 4,418 in 1860, and despite the Civil War, establishing a public school system was of paramount concern. 

  In 1864, city ordinance formed the “Kansas City Board of Public Schools” but the turmoil of the Civil War delayed any formal opening of any public schools.

  In general, the first schools were “hastily and scantily furnished” when they opened in September 1867. The first school built for the purposes of educating children was Washington School at Independence Avenue and Cherry. It had eight rooms and a capacity of 500 students.

  When school buildings were planned, there was little concern for items we consider of the utmost importance today. Most of the buildings were “improperly lighted and poorly ventilated” on small lots with narrow hallways and deep stairways. There were no gyms or auditoriums.

  The first superintendent, J.B. Bradley, led the way in the opening of the public schools. In all, there were 16 teachers hired for the entire city, and the first high school opened in two rooms in the basement of a building at 11th and Locust. It was called Central.

  Mary Harmon was hired as the very first teacher at Central High School, working with the superintendent to educate the few children sent there. The Kansas City Times later reported, “The new high school was still considered a waste of money by many citizens and the small staff struggled long before the taxpayers were convinced a high school was necessary.” 

  There were several blatant challenges for Miss Harmon in her new role as teacher at Central High School. For one, she was younger than many of the students sent there, as she was 17 years old and fresh out of high school herself. Another challenge was convincing the public that schooling for teenagers was even necessary when many families relied upon their children for income.

  By 1870, the Kansas City School District was on their third superintendent, and Central High School boasted 39 students- 18 male and 21 female. It was efficiently run by Professor Pratt and Miss Mary Harmon, “a young lady of superior attainments.” 

  Students in the small Central High School studied rhetoric, geometry, algebra, Latin, chemistry, philosophy and English.

  In 1873, Mary was one of four teachers – and the least paid at $900 per year. While Miss Harmon continued to teach multiple subject areas, she shined in English class where she read and discussed the classics with students “instead of following the tradition of studying in texts the lives and works of authors.”

  This new technique was noticed by a national publisher looking for new textbook ideas. The publisher asked Miss Harmon to give him a list of questions she used in her discussions and “an annotated edition of the classics” was printed by Ginn & Co. with the guidance of the young teacher.

  Mary Harmon was front and center during the growing pains of the school district. Modeling itself after the St. Louis public schools, Kansas City’s Central High began teaching German in 1871 and added U.S. history, physiology, penmanship, geography, grammar, music, composition and elocution in its first 10 years in operation. 

  There was little regulation of schools and even fewer requirements for teachers at the time. Mary Harmon didn’t even earn her state teaching certificate until 1876- eight years after entering the profession.

  By 1877, 10 years after the school district’s founding, the district grew from 16 to 58 teachers with eight of them stationed at Central High School’s temporary quarters. Enrollment at the high school grew to 223 in its tenth year, clearly indicating the lack of buy-in of the importance of a secondary education.

  Regardless, the Kansas City School District did grow in size; by 1877, 4,411 students spanned 12 buildings across the city.

  Mary Harmon’s consistent advocacy for a meaningful high school education continued. In 1879, she presented a paper titled “Influence of Geometry on the Pupil” where she argued that “the world now demands not only more experienced but more cultured teachers.” Although she was well-known for her innovative English classes, Mary claimed the study of geometry by high school students was paramount to critical thinking. She wrote, “[Geometry] enables the pupil to demonstrate his attention, sharpens his reasoning powers, and impels the student to think for himself.” 

Moving From Teacher to Advocate

 The early 1880s was a pivotal time of innovation in Kansas City. With a population just under 56,000, the city’s residents were demanding modernization in both the schools and in the home.

  In 1881, Edwin Ruthven Weeks (1855-1938) was hired as superintendent of the Kawsmouth Electric Company to bring electricity to the city. Educated at Exeter and a personal friend of Thomas Edison’s, Edwin was a bright young man with a family tied to early education. Shortly after the Civil War, his father fixed up a building near Westport for his sister to teach newly-freed African Americans.

  Edwin met and fell in love with Miss Mary Harmon, marrying her on Christmas Eve 1882. At the time of their marriage, Mary had already invested 14 years as a teacher at Central High School.

 The growth of the school district demanded for the first time a brand-new high school building constructed at 11th and Locust. In 1883, the new Central High School building opened, with Mrs. Mary Weeks still acting as one of the primary instructors.

  When Mary and Edwin welcomed their only child, Ruth Mary Weeks, in 1886, Mary finally gave up her career in the classroom. She did briefly return to teach for a year at the request of her former student and Board of Education president, J.V.C. Karnes “who wanted his daughter to study algebra and geometry under the direction of ‘Miss Harmon.’” 

  While living at their two-story brick home at 1409 Cherry – the first electrified house in Kansas City – Mary placed her daughter in a private kindergarten because there was no kindergarten offered in public schools. 

  Just as she did as a devout teacher, Mary wasn’t about to stop advocating for a good public school education, so she opted to start a three-year campaign to introduce kindergarten at the public schools. She knew the importance of starting children young in learning programs, and due to her efforts, Kansas City Public Schools added kindergarten in 1894. By 1899, there were five kindergartens in the city.

  She wrote of the importance of kindergarten in June 1895, stating, “All educational thought is turning to the conclusion ‘the beginnings are wrong;’ and when we consider that over 68 percent of our children are in the first four of our eleven grades, we can more fully realize how important it is that our best thought, our best work, should be in the beginning, and should be so spent as to create the best foundations for an industrious, useful and happy life.”

  Mary also found there was no real partnership between teachers and parents, and this was also recognized nationally as school districts across the country continued organizing and growing. In 1897, the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Association, now commonly known as the PTA, was formed. In Kansas City, Mary Harmon Weeks helped to organize a “mother’s union” at Irving School in the 1890s- the first of what would be recognized as the PTA in the state of Missouri.  

  But her advocacy didn’t just involve the school system. In 1894, she was a director of the Kansas City Art School- a precursor to the Kansas City Art Institute. In that same year, she was one of the founders of the Kansas City Athenaeum, an organization still in existence today. By the turn of the last century, membership of the Athenaeum grew to over 500 members.

  Mary’s daughter, Ruth Mary, graduated from Central High School in 1903 and continued her education at Vassar. When she graduated in 1908, she was the top student of 216 in her class. She was selected to be sent by her class to Europe where she spent time “investigating the trade schools of Paris.” 

  This innovative idea of the importance of trade schools – a trend popular in today’s public school system – was a passion of both Ruth Mary Weeks and her mother, Mary. When Ruth Mary returned from Europe, she wrote a small book called “The People’s School.”

  The New York Times reported in 1912, “The high school, as it now is organized, [Ruth Mary Weeks] considers an expensive institution, which does very little for the sort of boys and girls it was established to benefit. Miss Weeks would put the money into trade schools, which, she is convinced, would greatly improve the status of the working folk in the country.”

  Meanwhile, Mary Harmon Weeks continued to advocate for innovative public schools that served as more than just a platform for book learning. She wrote in 1906 that school buildings “should be made the centres for the social and literary life of their districts, pleasant gathering points, taking the places of public libraries and club rooms in their cities. Unless our system of public education is to fail utterly of making well rounded citizens, the school and the home must draw more closely together, making two integral but coalescing parts of civic life.”

National Recognition and Part of the PTA

  Mary Harmon Weeks didn’t just organize teachers and parents in Kansas City; she served on a national level. In 1912, Mary was elected secretary of the national PTA.

  Federal leadership in education fell to the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Education at the time. Mary wrote as the secretary of the PTA to the Commissioner of Education. “The strongest, most active, most far-reaching department of the congress is that of the parent-teacher work, through which it hopes to retain in the home its full share of child nurture,” Mary wrote in 1912. “Unfortunately, there has been of late too strong a tendency to thrust much of this upon the overburdened schools.”

  Her strong literary skills were put to work again in 1914 when the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations spent $35,000 to compile a book titled “Parents and Their Problems and Child Welfare in Home, School, Church and State.” Serving as the editor of the book, Mary Harmon Weeks organized the writings of 164 authors including Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. 

  She served as vice president of the National Congress on Mothers in 1916, was a founding member of the PTA in Missouri, and worked with her husband closely with the Kansas City chapter of the Humane Society where Edwin Weeks served as president for 45 years.

  Even though Mary Harmon Weeks had left the classroom, her daughter, Ruth Mary, entered it. She taught for 30 years at Paseo and Westport High Schools in the old Kansas City Junior College. 

 By 1920, the state PTA organized by Mary Harmon Weeks grew to over 26,000 members- and 17,000 of them were stationed in Kansas City. In the same year, 98 Kansas Citians were given the “Who’s Who” title of distinction of which only seven of these were women.

  “To one Kansas City family goes the honor of having three members represented in this year’s ‘Who’s Who,’” the Kansas City Post reported. “Edwin R. Weeks, humanitarian, shares the honor with his wife, Mrs. Mary Harmon Weeks, author and editor, and his daughter, Ruth Mary Weeks, teacher and author.” 

  In 1921, Border Star School’s PTA at 63rd and Wornall started the Mary Harmon Weeks Scholarship Foundation with the goal to raise $100 “for the purpose of keeping poor children in school.” They bought books and clothing for students who would “otherwise be denied an education for lack of these essentials.”  The following year, the scholarship was a citywide movement. In just three years, they’d helped 90 children. One girl helped, the newspaper reported, “was mother to her brother and sisters and carries her school work, too.”

  Age certainly didn’t slow Mary Harmon Weeks down. When she was 86 years old, she traveled alone by train to Richmond, Va. for the annual PTA conference. It wasn’t until she was confined to her bed at the age of 89 that Mary finally was forced to slow down.

  It was in this bed at 3408 Harrison Street that Mary Harmon Weeks passed away May 24, 1940 with her daughter by her side. The PTA quickly established a resolution to continue to fund the Mary Harmon Weeks Scholarship Foundation, writing, “We feel that the greatest honor we can pay her for so many years beyond the allotted span of life worked unceasingly for the welfare of children and youth, is a continuation of what she so nobly began. . . It is our conviction that it would be her wish that we keep our memory of her forever living and vibrant.”

Lasting Legacy of Women Educators

  When Mary Harmon began her career as a high school teacher at 17, she was standing on her own in an unfamiliar city unsure of the future of education. By the time she departed this life, she had revolutionized the way literature was taught, successfully campaigned for kindergartens, developed a national reputation with the PTA and established a solid women’s organization, the Kansas City Athenaeum. 

  Her daughter, Ruth Mary Weeks, continued this legacy as an educator for three decades in Kansas City institutions, retiring on the centennial anniversary of Kansas City Public Schools. She, like her mother, made her mark on education by serving as president of Kansas City Association of High School Women, the National Council of Teachers of English, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and author of several English textbooks. 

  In 1968, KCPS aptly named a school in her honor. Mary Harmon Weeks Elementary School opened at 4201 Indiana. A year later, Ruth Mary Weeks passed away.

  Unfortunately, as part of the “Rightsizing process” consolidating Kansas City Schools, the school with her name closed in 2010 due to “declining building conditions.” In 2024, the building was demolished.

  Regardless of the lack of a namesake building in her honor, the legacy of Mary Harmon Weeks cannot be forgotten. Even when her personal life as a mother ended her teaching career, Mary didn’t throw in the towel; she continued to advocate for children everywhere, ensuring that public education didn’t leave anyone behind- a message certainly pertinent today.