Butte’s public schools had a total enrolment of 7,245 in 1906, a significant increase over the 5,949 counted in 1900.
The 3,761 girls and 3,484 boys were instructed by a total of 210 teachers, plus 14 principals and a substitute corps of 10, spread over 14 schools. The greatest enrolment in 1900 was at Lincoln School, with 909, but Grant was a close second at 885 students, and Grant was the most populous school in 1906.
The six-month revenue for the district totaled $120,440.89 in 1906, derived from a county apportionment of $60,854, a state allotment of $35,481, the special Industrial School Fund of $15,709, and a library fund of almost $8,400. They also held a general fund of $125,000.
Expenses for the six months ran to $187,553, with almost 70% of that in teachers’ salaries, adding up to more than $130,000. Monthly teacher pay averaged just over $100 per month per teacher at a time when a miner working six days a week made $90 or $95 a month. Alice Dinsmoor, the superintendent of schools for the district, received $120 per month. Other six-month expenses included almost $12,000 for janitors, $1,200 for truant officers, $1,047 for utilities, and $157.50 for “care of horse.”
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Thomas E. Speirs was the only male principal of a Butte school through most of the 1900 to 1910 time frame. He was born in West Virginia where he began teaching when he was 17 years old, and he taught in Washington and Idaho before coming to Butte in 1895 when he was 25 years old. He served as a teacher for about a year before he was appointed principal of Grant School.
Thomas Speirs pictured in the Anaconda Standard on Dec. 29, 1906.
In 1900 Thomas Speirs roomed at 17 West Broadway with his brother Hugh, who became a Butte city police officer in 1907. 17 West Broadway, the Mantle & Bielenberg Block that still stands there today, had lodging rooms on the third floor along with halls where seventeen different unions held weekly meetings, as many as four per day at times. Thomas later lived at the Goldberg Block, at the northwest corner of Park and Dakota Streets, the building that became the J.C. Penney store and burned down in 1972.
During his tenure as Grant School principal, Speirs was chosen president of the Montana Teachers’ Association when it met in Butte in 1906. The state association had 675 members that year, and attendees acclaimed the Butte convention “the best ever.”
Grant School in 1905, from Annual Report of the Board of Education and City Superintendent of Schools.
Thomas Speirs led Grant School until about 1909 when he moved to Everett, Washington, and then Portland, Oregon, where he was principal of a grade school when he died in 1927 at age 57.
The original Grant School was on Division Street just south of Mercury between Grant and Gaylord, a site east of the Belmont headframe today. By 1898 it was overcrowded with 70 students per classroom, and a new school was built on Atlantic Street at Galena (northeast of today’s Belmont Senior Center). When the Atlantic Street School opened in early 1900 it was renamed Grant, and the original Grant School building was sold for $2,000 and lost to expansion of the Belmont Mine yard. The new (1900) Grant School was demolished in 1975 to make room for the expansion of the Berkeley Pit.