Michigan Mystery

The letter to the Detroit Free Press was signed by an indignant resident of nearby Litchfield. He wanted the paper to know that something peculiar was going on in his town. The school superintendent, he said, was ordering teachers to pad their class records with the names of pupils they had never seen. The writer thought the paper ought to investigate.

The Free Press thought so too, immediately sent a reporter scurrying out to Litchfield. Last week, readers all over the state were hearing about the "mystery of the missing Mexicans."

The missing Mexicans turned out to be the children of migrant Mexican workers who had been in the district the year before, had since moved away. The man behind the mystery was Litchfield's Superintendent Hubert A. Bearss, who thought his schools and teachers could well use a bit more state money. Because the state figures $147 a year for each pupil on the rolls, Bearss had told his teachers to keep listing their missing Mexican pupils as present & accounted for.

Under questioning by state officials, Superintendent Bearss admitted that he had invented 89 "ghost" pupils for a total profit of $13,000 to Litchfield's schools. He also admitted that he had burned all records in the case. "Without the records," he explained, "I did not think there would be much of a case."

The case against Bearss was clear enough: he was indicted for destroying public records, faced a top penalty of two years in prison. But that did not clear up the mystery entirely. Were other superintendents also padding their rolls? This week Governor G. Mennen Williams ordered a statewide investigation to find out.

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