The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The biennial reports of Florida’s Superintendent of Public Instruction

Every two years from the 1890s onward, Florida’s Superintendent of Public Instruction printed a report to the Governor on the state’s schools. Each volume gathers a narrative report from every county superintendent in Florida, followed by several hundred pages of statewide tables.

For this project the series is the single richest source on Avon Park’s schools that exists outside the county’s own filing cabinets, and until 2026 nobody working on this bundle had opened it. It supplies the founding dates of the school buildings, the bond issues that paid for them, the names of principals, the number of pupils, and — because Florida counted its schools by race — a year-by-year measure of what segregation actually cost Avon Park’s Black children.

Why this series matters here

Avon Park was in DeSoto County until 1921 and in Highlands County afterwards, so the town’s schools are reported first under one county heading and then under another. The county superintendent’s narrative is where the useful sentences are. It was written to impress Tallahassee, so it dwells on new buildings and bond issues, which is exactly what a local historian wants.

The 1912-1914 volume, for instance, gives both the date and the financing of Avon Park’s first substantial school building in two sentences: a “modern brick” building under construction, paid for out of a $25,000 bond issue voted by Avon Park Special Tax School District No. 3.[dpi-1912-1914]

What each part of a volume holds

The county superintendent’s narrative. Usually three to six pages under a county heading, with sub-headings such as New Buildings, Buildings and Bonds, High Schools, School Libraries, Special Tax School Districts, Teaching Force and School Term. This is where Avon Park is named in prose.

The statewide tables. Numbered tables covering, among much else, the number of schools and the average length of term in each county, split white and colored; teachers and their average monthly salaries, split the same way; accredited and non-accredited high schools, named with their principals and enrollments; outstanding school-district bonded debt by district; and the disbursement of the Slater Fund, the Smith-Hughes and George-Reed vocational funds and the state’s own school funds.

The teacher-certificate roll. An alphabetical list of everyone holding a state teaching certificate, with the subjects certified and a post-office address. Searching it for “Avon Park” recovers teachers’ names from years when no other record survives.

The two breaks in the run

Two gaps limit what the series can tell this project, and both matter.

Highlands County filed no narrative report at all for the 1920-1922 or the 1922-1924 biennia. Under the county heading in each volume there is one line: “HIGHLANDS COUNTY. No report filed.”[dpi-1922-1924] The county was created in April 1921, in the middle of the first of those biennia, and evidently had no office ready to report. The cost to this project is severe, because those are precisely the years in which Avon Park’s large high school complex was built. The state’s silence about that building is an administrative accident, not evidence that nothing happened.

After the 1934-1936 volume the series stops naming towns. From 1936-1938 the report was restructured as Educational Progress in Florida, a statewide narrative reporting county aggregates only.[dpi-1936-1938] Every volume from 1936-1938 through 1958-1960 was checked, and none carries school-level or town-level detail for Avon Park. Anything after 1936 has to come from the county’s own records instead.

How to read them

The volumes are digitized on the Internet Archive, free and without a login, under identifiers of the form SuperintendentOfPublicInstruction<YYYY-YYYY>; the 1912-1914 volume is the odd one out, filed under 19121914.[dpi-1904-1906][dpi-1912-1914]

Three practical warnings, each learned the hard way:

The download filename is not always predictable. It is often <identifier>_djvu.txt, but several volumes use a different internal name — 1914-1916ready_djvu.txt, for example.[dpi-1914-1916] Read the item’s own metadata for the true filename rather than guessing, or a working volume will look like a missing one. An earlier pass of this project wrongly concluded that no report between 1921 and 1960 had been digitized, purely because of a failed download.

The town’s name is sometimes broken by the scanner. In the 1928-1930 volume the optical character recognition renders it “Avon Park”, with two spaces, and once as “Avon Parts”. A search for the ordinary single-spaced spelling returns nothing and the whole volume looks empty.

The plain text of a table is usually unusable, and there is a way round it. Column boundaries collapse and figures migrate between rows. The remedy is to fetch the volume’s _djvu.xml instead, which gives every word with its pixel coordinates on the page, group the words into rows by their vertical position and into columns by their horizontal position, and then check each reconstructed row’s arithmetic — white plus colored should equal the total. That recovers reliable figures from tables whose plain text is noise, and it is how the Black-school figures in this bundle were read.

What the tables show about segregation

Because Florida counted white and Black schools separately, the series measures the gap directly, and the numbers are worse than the prose. DeSoto County’s superintendent reported in 1914-1916 that the county had repaired “51 school houses for whites at a cost of $11,386, and three colored schools for $391.88,” and closed the paragraph with the county’s motto, “the best is not too good for the boys and girls of DeSoto County.”[dpi-1914-1916] The same report records that of the schools inside the county’s forty special tax school districts — the local levy that paid for longer terms, better salaries and new buildings — seventy-eight were for white children and four were for Black.[dpi-1914-1916]

The term-length tables tell the same story annually. In 1910-1911 DeSoto’s white schools ran an average of 104 days and its colored schools 80.[dpi-1904-1906] By 1918-1920 the county superintendent was reporting new brick buildings at $45,000 and $25,000 in white towns while Avon Park made do with a $4,000 frame stopgap.[dpi-1918-1920]

The later volumes go further and name names. The 1930-1932 and 1932-1934 reports record the John F. Slater Fund subventions paid to Highlands County’s single Black county training school, listed in 1931-32 as “$325” for “Highlands — Sebring-Avon Park” before reverting to “Sebring Negro School.”[dpi-1930-1932][dpi-1932-1934] The 1934-1936 report prints statewide directories of both accredited and non-accredited Negro public high schools, each entry giving the school, its post office, its classification and its principal, alongside the equivalent directory for white schools and federal vocational allocations.[dpi-1934-1936] Read together, those tables establish both what Highlands County provided for its Black pupils and what it did not.

Details of what the series yields on Avon Park’s Black schools, including the Slater Fund entries, are set out in Report: the schools of Avon Park.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1904-1906 (1906)
  2. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1912-1914 (1914)
  3. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1914-1916 (1916)
  4. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1918-1920 (1920)
  5. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1922-1924 (1924)
  6. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1930-1932 (1932)
  7. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1932-1934 (1934)
  8. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Florida, 1934-1936 (1936)
  9. Colin English, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Educational Progress in Florida, Part I of the Biennial Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1936-1938 (1939)

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