E. Clarke Fontaine
school principal and summer-school director · active 1918
Principal of Pocomoke City High School, elected by the Maryland State Board of Education as Director of the state summer training school for teachers at Ocean City for 1918 -- its fourth session, running 24 June to 2 August. He designed that year's programme around the untrained and emergency-certificated teachers the war had left the state with, and added a model one-room school made up of Ocean City children from the first to the sixth grade.
In the record (2)
1918 · 1918-06-24
Ocean City runs one of Maryland's three state summer schools for teachers -- with a model one-room school of local children.
In 1918 the State Board of Education conducted summer training schools for teachers at exactly three places in Maryland: Ocean City, Towson and Frostburg. E. Clarke Fontaine, principal of Pocomoke City High School, was Director of the Ocean City school, which the Board announced in March would "begin its sessions on June 24th and continue until August 2nd," limited to teachers taking their first summer session and to that year's high-school graduates intending to teach. On 22 June the Messenger carried Fontaine's own dispatch, datelined Ocean City, calling it "the fourth session of the Ocean City summer school" and noting that enrolment, "larger than in previous years, will be limited to beginners and to those teachers who were granted provisional certificates last year and employed on what is known as the 'emergency' when so many teachers throughout the State suddenly resigned to accept clerical positions at Washington." The distinctive feature: "a model one-room school, made up of about [thirty-five] pupils of Ocean City and vicinity and composed of children from the first to the sixth grade, inclusive, in which will be daily demonstrated by one of the instructors the methods of teaching the various subjects in the average rural school curriculum." The school closed the last week of July. Around it, the Mt. Pleasant Hotel advertised all season, in paper after paper: "SPECIAL RATES TO TEACHERS."
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