Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 



203 



The Missouri Home Makers' Conference is making every effort 

 to extend this work and hopes to get in touch with many girls over 

 the State. 



Mrs. Quick. 



HOT LUNCHES IN RURAL SCHOOL. 



(Mrs. Fannie Quick, Rockport, Mo.) 



To many teachers it would no doubt 

 seem almost an impossibility to try to have 

 hot lunches in the rural school, but I have 

 demonstrated the fact that it can be done. I 

 admit that it takes energy, and not only 

 energy, but a deep interest in the dear boys 

 and girls who are entrusted to our care for 

 eight or nine months in the year. 



I feel that when a teacher enters her 

 school in the fall she should enter it with the 

 full determination of making that the very 

 happiest, best and most successful year of 

 her life. I know full well of the many things 

 we meet that seem as barriers to us, but they 

 are not. It is only in the seeming. I know you have told your boys 

 and girls many times that "Where there is a will there is a way." 

 Now take that to yourself. 



The first question with you will be, "How did you manage the 

 work?" I will answer it. I had been in the same school two years 

 and the third year I introduced cooking. In the first place, about 

 two weeks before the end of my second year of school a member 

 of the board asked me to take the school the next year. I did so. 

 I also asked permission to be present at the meeting when the 

 directors met to contract, etc. I went to the meeting and was given 

 an opportunity to speak. First, I asked permission to take a little 

 time from the regular lessons, to give the girls that education which 

 I feel they are so much in need of, not so much during school days 

 but in after years. The board very kindly permitted me to do 

 this. I then asked if we might give an ice cream social to raise 

 the necessary funds to equip our kitchen, and to this they consented. 

 So it was all settled as far as the board was concerned. We gave the 

 social, and it was a success in every way. We went right to work, 

 curtained off one corner of our room (about eight feet square, I 

 should think) and in this was one window that gave us sufficient 



