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example, he asked me to pad the budget by a million dollars. He said," I do not want to hurt the schools but I want to cut a million dollars out of next year's budget. You just put in enough extra that the Board can make a million dollar cut." Of course I knew this cut would make headlines in the local paper and I was tempted to refuse him and call in the news reporters and expose the whole thing. I did not do it because I knew it would just start a fight that we could not win. I put in the extra amount and the Board cut it out and got their headlines. There was a great deal more of this sort of thing and relationships were very strained between Board Members and Administrators so that not many new programs were implemented in my last few years in Torrance. No employee is likely to suggest a new program if the whole atmosphere is negative around him and no opportunity is missed to demonstrate the inadequacy of school personnel.

Fortunately, I was able to go ahead with installation of automated equipment in the Business Office. During my first years in Torrance I had organized an Advisory Committee on Accounts, Reports and Records. We started out with IBM punch-cards and then moved to computers as we got the systems ironed out. It requires a lot of discipline for fifteen hundred employees to submit clean accurate data and the Unit Record System seemed to develop that discipline. When all the bugs had been ironed out, we shifted to the IBM 1440 computer and put grade reporting, pupil attendance, financial records and reports on it. One consistent aspect I noted in the computer area at that time is that no computer or system would do all the functions that the manufacturer said it would. It is best to begin with very modest applications which are paralleled by older proven systems until all the problems are ironed out. I knew of one large school district that did not have a reliable financial report for one whole year because they put everything on a Remington-Rand Univac system and it just would not produce the results. Today the small high-capacity computers would work just fine but we did not have those in the 1950s and 1960s. The large "hay balers" we were working with were very hard to keep accurate because data put into them seemed to remain there and then would show up at unexpected times and places. The watch word was," If you put garbage in, you get garbage out." That is a catchy saying but it does not help in those cases where legitimate data turns to "garbage" while it is in the system. In other words, it was valid when it went in but became outdated or been superseded but was impossible to clean out. This problem caused most of our headaches in using early computers.

I want to mention at least two professional organizations in which I was active during my years in School Business Management. First is CASBO, California Association of School Business Officials. This group covered the whole field of School Business and was a very helpful organization. The State was divided into Sections or geographical areas and there was a monthly meeting of members in each section. We had a state convention each May at which there were programs of interest to all members. We covered such areas as food services, pupil transportation, maintenance of