In Action for Mental Health, the final report of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, it was suggested that the school was in one of the best positions for treating the mental health of its pupils. That report also stressed in its introduction what appears to have been carried out in the Almont project as described in Teaching the Troubled Child. Jack R. Ewalt, director of the Joint Commission, wrote in 1961, “If we are to accelerate the mental health movement, reduce mental illness, and improve mental health, we must rise above our self-preservative functions as members of different professions and different social classes and adherents of different economic philosophies and illuminate the means of working together out of mutual respect for our fellow man” (pp. xxvi-xxvii).

The Elmont, New York, project described in Teaching the Troubled Child utilized “teacher moms” for one-to-one relationships in the education of severely disturbed children, who could not tolerate instruction in