Three men from Parsons, Kansas, led a campaign for school reform legislation in the legislative sessions of 1939 to 1941.
Payne Ratner, from Parsons, was elected Governor of Kansas in 1938 and reelected in 1940 on a platform that included school reform. Frank Pinet, a former Parsons School Superintendent, was by then the veteran Executive Director of the Kansas State Teachers Association. Rees Hughes, who had been the Parsons School Superintendent since 1922, became chair of the KSTA's Legislative Affairs Committee. The three men worked together with others to promote an ambitious agenda, including state support of school districts with a view toward mitigating property-tax inequalities, state-provided textbooks, a retirement plan for teachers, and non-partisan governing boards for K-12 schools and the state colleges. Their efforts contributed to the passage of the Kansas Teachers Retirement Act on April 9, 1941, the last day of that year's legislative session.
The documents in this collection were saved by Rees Hughes in folders labeled "Legislative" and "Governor." They have been assembled and organized by his grandchildren and donated to Kansas Historical Society to supplement its other records of the time.
The collection consists largely of letters between Hughes, Pinet, and Governor Ratner, and between them and other Kansas educators. The letters shed light on the characters of the three men and on the needs and customs of the time. They reveal an early model for the mobilization of teachers and School Superintendents to influence state education policy. They provide only an incomplete story of events, so any historian will need to rely on other public records for a full timeline.
Here are the Hughes Collection files on this site: