Ocean City Summer School
government · founded 1915
Also known as State Summer School for the training of Public School Teachers, Ocean City
One of three Maryland State Summer School Centers run by the State Board of Education — with Towson and Frostburg — held annually at Ocean City in the state school building. Its declared function was training beginning teachers with no previous professional preparation and emergency wartime teachers whose qualifications fell below the new education law's minimum. Tuition was free to Maryland teachers and the whole five-week session was reckoned to cost a student under $50. Enrolment was 60 in 1918, double the previous year and 50 per cent above any previous session; 100 were expected for the fifth session, 23 June to 26 July 1919. The State Board endowed it with a teachers' professional library that was to remain "the permanent property of the Ocean City School." Director in 1919: E. Clarke Fontaine of Pocomoke City.
In the record (5)
1919
More than 800 Maryland teachers begin summer courses at Towson, Frostburg, Ocean City and Bowie — 250 of them Black, the largest such enrollment the state had recorded.
Annapolis Evening Capital, 25 June 1919: "Some of the Anne Arundel county teachers are taking advantage of the six-week course for teachers of the elementary schools which began yesterday at the State Normal Schools at Towson, Frostburg, Ocean City and Bowie, under the supervision of the Maryland State Board of Education … A total of more than 800 teachers of the elementary schools began the course yesterday. Of these 250 are colored teachers, the largest enrollment of colored teachers ever recorded in Maryland. There are a total of 700 colored teachers at present teaching in the state." Ocean City and Bowie are in the same sentence and were not the same place: Bowie was Maryland's normal school for Black teachers. The record does not say whether any Black teacher attended at Ocean City, and on the town's documented practice it is unlikely.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1919
Ocean City is one of Maryland's three state summer schools for teachers; the fifth session opens 23 June 1919.
"The Fifth Annual Session of the State Summer School for the training of Public School Teachers will convene at Ocean City on Monday, June 23rd" — five weeks instead of six, with Saturday classes, closing 26 July. "As there is no tuition charge to Maryland teachers, the entire cost of attending the session should not exceed $50.00, and might be made even less." The Ocean City school was one of three State Summer School Centers under the State Board of Education, with Towson and Frostburg; its "special function" was "the training of beginning teachers who have had no previous professional training, and also teachers in service who have been employed in emergencies to fill vacancies during the past two years." It had 60 students in 1918 — "about double the number of the previous year, and exceeded by 50% any previous enrollment in the school's history" — and expected 100 in 1919. The State Board had just funded a teachers' professional library that would be "the permanent property of the Ocean City School." Faculty: E. Clarke Fontaine, A.M., Director ("Theory and Practice of Teaching and School Law"); Hannah A. Kieffer, A.M. ("Rural School Management and Sociology"); Frances H. Clarke, B.S. ("Educational Psychology"); Mary H. Hamilton, A.B. ("The Teaching of Elementary School English").
Fifth annual session in 1919 means the school began in 1915 — the same year the county's teachers famously refused to leave Ocean City. The town had been a convention resort for forty years; in the 1910s the State of Maryland made it a campus.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1920
The Maryland State Teachers' Association met at Ocean City on 29-30 June and 1 July 1920 — its fifteenth convention in the town.
"The executive committee of the State Teachers' Association has selected June 29 and 30 and July 1 as the dates for its annual convention at Ocean City, Md. This meeting will be the fiftieth to be held by the association and will be the fifteenth at Ocean City." Officers for 1920: president G. Lloyd Palmer of Frederick; first vice-president Dr. David E. Weglein, principal of Western High School, Baltimore; second vice-president Miss Lena C. Van Bibber of the State Normal School, Towson; secretary Hugh W. Caldwell of Elkton; treasurer Dr. R. Berryman of Baltimore. Sessions ran at the State School Building, four general meetings and departmental sections; county superintendents met beforehand at the Denton home of Dr. M. Bates Stephens, the former State Superintendent, and came on to Ocean City together. County board clerks organised for the first time. Delegates came from Anne Arundel, Cecil, Garrett and Dorchester; George Fox of Anne Arundel was made chairman of the committee on auditors; "many of them, however, decided to remain at the seaside resort for a few days longer, making a vacation of their trip." This is the same building and the same institutional habit as `org:ocean-city-summer-school`, and fifteen conventions back from 1920 puts the association's first Ocean City meeting around 1906.
The association's fiftieth or fifty-third annual meeting — the same paper printed both, five months apart. Its fifteenth at Ocean City is given twice and is not in dispute.
State Teachers' Association of Maryland
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1923 · 1923-08-30
Worcester County's teachers hold a two-day institute at the State Educational building at Ocean City, with the State Superintendent present.
Worcester Democrat, 25 August 1923: "A Two-Day Institute for the teachers of Worcester county will be held at the State Educational building at Ocean City, Thursday and Friday, August 30 and 31. Dr. Albert S. Cook, State Superintendent of Schools, will be present on Friday and address the teachers. Miss Jewell Simpson, State Supervisor of Elementary Schools, will also be present and speak to the Elementary and Primary grade teachers on the teaching of Reading… Sessions each day will begin at 10 A. M. and continue until 1 P. M." The State's teaching building at Ocean City — home of the State Summer School whose fifth session met there in 1919, and the hall in which the Board of Trade held its winter meeting — was still in service.
Board of Education of Worcester County
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1927
Washington's Episcopal diocese sends scholarship teachers to a summer school at Ocean City, opening 20 June for six days.
The Episcopal Diocese of Washington's department of religious education listed the Peninsula Summer School at Ocean City, Md., opening 20 June 1927 and continuing six days, among four summer schools to which it granted partial scholarships — the others being Sweet Briar College, Va. (12 days from 20 June), the Blue Mountain Conference at Hood College, Frederick (11–23 July), and "the Lawrenceville Conference for colored church workers at St. Paul School, Va., July 18 to 30". Miss Lilia Lyman, a junior at Western High School and a Sunday-school teacher at St. Margaret's, was awarded the vestry's scholarship and left for Ocean City on Monday 20 June with Miss Atala Lamar, another St. Margaret's teacher, and Comdr. C. T. Jewell, superintendent of the school.
The Ocean City the campaign has mostly seen is a beach with hotels on it. This is the other Ocean City: an out-of-season conference town, cheap in June, hosting the religious training of a diocese two states away — and running the colored conference somewhere else entirely, at St. Paul School in Virginia, exactly as the railroad ran the colored excursion in September.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-06