What Did It Cost to Educate a Child in Wheeling in 1871?
An extraordinary newspaper report reveals how Wheeling’s Board of Education measured the cost of public schooling—and where the city’s Colored School stood within that system.
On August 19, 1871, the Wheeling Intelligencer published something that may appear ordinary to modern readers: a set of school statistics.
Yet this small column is an extraordinary historical record.
Drawn from official documents presented at a meeting of the Wheeling Board of Education, the report calculated the cost of educating a pupil in each of the city’s schools. It separated instructional expenses from the costs of buildings, fuel, books, repairs, janitors, administration, printing, and even the official enumeration of school-age children.
The newspaper urged that the figures “should be read by every taxpayer in this School District.”
This may be one of the earliest public presentations of detailed per-pupil costs yet located in Wheeling’s educational history. Whether it was the first will require further research, but its importance is already clear: by 1871, the Board of Education was attempting to measure not merely how much money it spent, but what that spending meant for each child.
The cost of instruction
The Board calculated instructional costs using each school’s “average monthly enrollment.” That distinction matters. The figures were not based on the total number of different children registered during the year or necessarily on average daily attendance. They reflected the average number carried on the monthly enrollment records.
The reported instructional cost per pupil was:
School | Instructional cost per pupil |
Washington | $12.11 |
Madison | $12.21 |
Clay | $11.45 |
Union | $10.45 |
Centre | $12.94 |
Webster | $9.98 |
“Colored” School | $11.24 |
The historical term “Colored School” is retained here because it is the designation used in the original record.
Across the English and German departments, the Board placed the instructional cost at $12.67 per pupil. Another $3.53 covered such items as rent, repairs, fuel, books, stationery, janitors, administrative salaries, printing, and the enumeration of school-age children.
That produced a reported total cost of:
$16.20 per pupil
In other words, the Board estimated that Wheeling spent $16.20 in 1870 dollars to provide one year of public education for a pupil represented in its average monthly enrollment.
The figure cannot be translated neatly into modern dollars. The economy, wages, length of the school term, buildings, staffing, and services available to students were all profoundly different. Its greater value comes from comparing the schools within the same system and the same year.
A revealing line for the Colored School
For our Foundation, the most consequential number is $11.24.
Only five years earlier, in the fall of 1866, the Wheeling Board of Education had established the city’s public school for Black children. It was supported through public taxation and operated as part of the municipal school system—not simply as a charitable undertaking or a temporary Freedmen’s Bureau school.
John W. West became its first teacher. Like teachers in schools for freed people throughout the country, West submitted reports that entered the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Those reports, together with Board proceedings and contemporary newspaper accounts, allow us to trace the institution’s earliest years with unusual clarity.
Now, in 1871, the school appeared directly in Wheeling’s public financial accounting.
That single line is important. It demonstrates that the school had become an established, measurable part of the district. It had an enrollment, a publicly paid teacher, an instructional cost, and a place in the figures presented to taxpayers.
Its reported cost of $11.24 per pupil was below the comparable figures for Washington, Madison, Clay, and Centre schools. It was above Union and Webster. Whatever other inequalities existed within the segregated system—and they certainly existed—the city’s own figures did not portray the Colored School as an exceptional financial burden.
It occupied the middle of the district’s reported cost range.
What the $600 salary may tell us
The expenditure statement accompanying the per-pupil figures recorded a payment of $600 to the “teacher in colored school” for the year.
If that $600 salary represented the school’s entire instructional expense, dividing it by the reported cost of $11.24 suggests an average monthly enrollment of approximately 53 pupils.
That number is a reconstruction rather than an explicitly printed enrollment total, but it offers an important insight. One teacher may have been responsible for more than fifty children of different ages and levels of preparation.
The figure also helps explain what happened next.
Within days of this publication, the Board advertised for an additional teacher for the Colored School. Candidates would undergo a competitive examination in orthography, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, and the theory and practice of teaching. The successful applicant would receive the same advertised annual salary of $600.
Alfred B. Wilson was ultimately selected to join John W. West.
Viewed together, the financial report and the teacher search document a school reaching the limits of a one-teacher structure. The hiring of a second instructor was not simply an administrative decision. It was evidence of growth, demand, and the determination of Black families to secure an education for their children only a few years after the destruction of slavery.
Why some pupils appeared more expensive than others
The Board also calculated instructional costs by grade level. Those figures varied dramatically.
In the lowest division, identified as Division D, reported costs generally ranged from $4.34 to $7.05 per pupil. In the grammar departments, once the salaries of principals were included, costs ranged from $32.76 to $44.00.
This does not mean that grammar pupils received six or seven times as much instruction. It most likely reflects the basic mathematics of school administration.
The lower grades ordinarily contained larger numbers of children, allowing one teacher’s salary to be divided across many pupils. Upper-level classes were smaller, while the salary of a principal remained a fixed expense. The fewer pupils over whom that expense could be distributed, the higher the calculated cost for each one.
The same caution applies when comparing individual schools. Per-pupil cost can reveal efficiency, but it can also reveal class size, staffing patterns, building arrangements, or differences in the number of children who remained in school long enough to enter the upper grades.
A low cost was not automatically proof of educational success. It could also mean that a teacher was carrying an exceptionally heavy load.
A substantial public investment
The Board reported total school-fund expenditures of $97,789.43 for 1870. More than $89,000 of that amount went to teachers in the English, German, and Colored departments.
The records also listed $31,457.43 in building-fund expenditures, most of it associated with construction of the Union Township schoolhouse. Additional expenses included heating equipment, furniture, construction work, architectural specifications, and the recording of property documents.
These were the financial outlines of a public-school system becoming more permanent and more complex.
Wheeling was building schools, paying teachers, employing janitors, purchasing books, repairing buildings, keeping enrollment records, and publishing the results for its taxpayers. Education was increasingly being treated as a continuing civic responsibility rather than an occasional act of charity.
For Black children, however, that public responsibility remained bounded by segregation. Inclusion in the budget did not mean equality in facilities, staffing, curriculum, or opportunity. The Colored School received public support, but it operated within a society that still separated children by race and sharply restricted the lives of Black citizens outside the classroom.
Both truths must be held together.
Wheeling’s Board of Education had taken a meaningful step by establishing and publicly funding the school in 1866. Black teachers, parents, and pupils then gave that institution its life and purpose. At the same time, its students were required to pursue their education within a system that denied them access to the schools attended by white children.
What Lorenzo Lucas’s Tuition Reveals
The $11.24 figure becomes even more meaningful when connected to the story of Lorenzo Lucas, the Black child from Bellaire, Ohio, who received permission to attend Wheeling’s Colored School.
In December 1868, Superintendent Williams presented the Board of Education with the request of a “non-resident colored youth” seeking admission to the school. The newspaper did not identify the child, but the Board’s surviving records reveal his name.
The Board admitted Lorenzo at $2.50 per quarter—one-half of the usual tuition charged to a nonresident pupil. The standard rate was therefore $5 per quarter.
If Lorenzo attended four quarters, his parents would have paid approximately $10 for the school year. Three years later, the Board reported that instruction at the Colored School cost $11.24 per pupil, while the district’s complete per-pupil cost—including fuel, books, repairs, janitors, administration, and other expenses—was $16.20.
Although the figures come from different years and should not be treated as an exact accounting match, the comparison is striking. Lorenzo’s estimated $10 annual tuition would have equaled approximately:
89 percent of the Colored School’s reported instructional cost per pupil; and
62 percent of the district’s total reported cost per pupil.
At the regular nonresident rate of $5 per quarter, four quarters would have cost $20—more than the Board’s entire reported per-pupil expense three years later. The half-rate decision was therefore a meaningful accommodation, but it did not make Lorenzo’s education free.
His parents still assumed a considerable obligation. In addition to tuition, they had to arrange and perhaps pay for his daily passage between Bellaire and Wheeling. The Ohio River, weather, winter ice, high water, transportation schedules, and the distance between the landing and the school all would have shaped his school day.
For a Black family living only a few years after the end of slavery—and within an economy that severely restricted African American employment and earnings—$2.50 each quarter represented more than a bookkeeping entry. It represented sacrifice, determination, and faith in what education could make possible.
The Board’s reduced tuition also tells us something about the growing reputation of Wheeling’s Colored School. A family living in another city and another state believed the education available there was worth crossing the river to obtain. Lorenzo’s application demonstrates that the school’s importance already extended beyond Wheeling’s municipal boundaries.
The 1871 statistics tell us what the Board believed it cost to educate a pupil. Lorenzo Lucas’s story reminds us that families bore costs of their own—costs measured not only in dollars, but in distance, time, travel, uncertainty, and extraordinary commitment.
More than a column of figures
The power of this clipping lies in its combination of numbers and human stories.
Behind the $11.24 were John W. West and his pupils.
Behind the $600 salary was a teacher carrying responsibility for what may have been more than fifty children.
Behind the decision to hire another instructor were families who continued sending their sons and daughters to school—and children whose attendance transformed a new institution into a lasting community.
And behind the Board’s $97,789.43 expenditure was an emerging idea: that educating Wheeling’s children was a public obligation worthy of taxation, professional teachers, permanent buildings, careful accounting, and public scrutiny.
The figures do not tell us everything. They do not measure the ambitions of the pupils, the sacrifices of their parents, the difficulty of teaching several levels in one room, or the unequal barriers Black children faced after leaving it.
But they tell us that the school was there.
They tell us that it was publicly funded.
They tell us that people attended in meaningful numbers.
And they tell us that, by 1871, the education of Wheeling’s Black children could no longer be omitted from the city’s official account of itself.
-T
Source: “School Statistics,” Wheeling Intelligencer, August 19, 1871. All monetary figures are stated in 1870–1871 dollars.
