Chapter 3 - V
Loss of privileges, penalties, punishments, etc.

Smoking in or about the dormitories, except as it may be permitted by faculty members in their own rooms, constitutes a fire hazard which cannot be tolerated and will make a student liable to expulsion. Breaking the smoking rules in any other way mill mean loss of the privilege for a definite time. Having in one's possession or drinking any intoxicating beverage anywhere in Moodstock will make a student subject to expulsion. Both of these misdemeanors are adjudged by the Discipline Committee. These rules regarding tobacco and intoxicants hold whether School is in session or not. Lateness in getting to the dormitory in the evening, lateness to bed or talking after 'taps' will mean no snacks. Lateness to class or other school appointments, or coming to the table with dirty face or hands, will wean making up at a special Saturday afternoon study hall double the time lost in the tardiness or in washing up for the meal in question. Messiness in the dormitory mill lead to an assignment of scrubbing the cellar stairs, the porch floor, or the brickmork of the fireplaces. Coming to the table with unsuitable or untidy dress will mean being sent away to change and the time thus lost made up in Saturday study hall. Going down town with unsuitable or untidy dress will mean deprivation of the down-town privilege. Clothing, books, or other possessions left around the building will be collected for the pound and redeemable for ten cents an article. Borrowing of others' books, clothing or other possessions without express permission of the owner will be treated as stealing and dealt with by the discipline committees"

-- 1946-47 Handbook, [pp. 14-15]

The first and apparently only WCS Handbook was written by Ken Webb The first and apparently only WCS Handbook was written by Ken Webb in the fall of 1946 to help new students understand the school, and to remind old students of the rules and customs that had been established during the first year. The moral accountant style disappeared from the school with Ken, and was probably never as strictly totted up as this summary suggests (though the school was never without a teacher or two more comfortable with the balance sheet approach to students' characters than trying to see them whole). However the moral accountability implicit in the handbook remained part of the school's code for all but the last few years of its existence.

As David increasingly shaped the school's character, the codification of rules all but disappeared. Certainly smoking in the dorms and drinking were still unacceptable, and students were even expelled for the offense, but infractions like lateness were increasingly dealt with by those who were affected, or as they became a problem pattern in a student's behavior. Likewise, study hall was not used as a punishment -- rather contradictory for a school to say that studying is a punishment in any case -- but remained a fairly strict means of dealing with students who had poor study habits or who tended to disturb others in unsupervised study. (The school's Bulletin of Information a few years later has no section devoted to rules, although the rules regarding smoking, automobiles, pets, and firearms are listed separately at logical points in the text. There is no mention of study hall or other minor rules.)

The school slowly but surely became a more relaxed place, not because of any loosening of standards as such, but because of a loosening of the means of achieving or enforcing those standards. David took the students for who they were, adolescents who were bound to make mistakes, but he trusted them to keep their mistakes from becoming too serious, and he could and did deal harshly with those who pushed the limits too hard.

"David's authoritarianism was different from Ken's," says Gerry Freund '48, David's friend and admirer for 35 years. "David's authoritarianism provided a tent within which you could operate with a lot of freedom. Ken Webb's authoritarianism applied to every single piece of your behavior. But David changed during the course of the years of his headmastership and there was no consistency. There were times when David would tolerate, and then there were times when David would excise students, sometimes in groups, simply deciding that they weren't for this experience. Nevertheless he infected his students. He gave freedom. He was capricious. He was the arbiter of this school. It was a one person school. There was never a possibility of anyone's competing for the center of attention. If they did, they would leave." [G.Freund int 6.7.84 I-2/5,11]

And the school flourished.

Enrollment, which was 35 students the first year, went to 61 the second, 65 the third, to 70 the fourth, to 79 the fifth, where it leveled off for five years.

Financially the school finished in the black even for the first year, due in great part to the strict control Elizabeth Johnson exercised as Treasurer. So strongly did she establish the principle of the school's living within its means that, for its first 21 years of operation it showed only one deficit and, at the end of that period, was virtually debt free. During its last 14 years, after David Bailey had retired, the school operated in the black for only two years and had debts of more than $800,000 when it closed.

"Certainly we built up a record of operating in the black in all the early years, the first two decades at least, without having the help of an endowment," David recalled. "It must be admitted that this was done at first because we took advantage of the faculty's willingness to work for very low cash salaries, way below national standards. To make that fact more palatable. we were a school in which the faculty enjoyed teaching. They got their reward largely through enjoyment of the quality of the student populus, the informality, the mutual respect, and the quality of the product. It also must be admitted that a large portion of the teachers these first few years had some income of their own to fall back on."

The teachers coming to Woodstock in those early years included a number who would help define the school for almost two decades. Of course these included David himself -- his favorite subject was geography, but he also taught English, Spanish, or whatever else was needed -- and Peggy, whose senior English class was a Woodstock tradition from 1947 to l967. But Peggy was never more that a part-time teacher, also doing Drama, and David was characteristically diffident about his own abilities "I recognized my own intellectual shortcomings and was more interested in hiring qualified faculty and giving them freedom to teach as best they could, while I myself specialized in managing the institution, in the athletics, and in what farming we could do."

Three important teachers were hired for the start of the school"s second year -- Buffy Dunker, Mounir Sa'adah, and Stan Deake. Buffy and Mounir would be part of the school's stable core faculty for years, while Stan Deake and Bob Lake, from the first year, would be at the center of two very different early crises.