Boy, Too Smart, Is Kept In School for Extra Year, April 18, 1965

CHATHAM. April 17 — AP — Henry Mitchell may be Pittsylvania County's first student who had to stay in high school an extra year because he was too smart.

He also may be the first 15-year-old to have a series of tests fail him because he made a perfect score.

Young Mitchell, son of J.T.W. Mitchell, a Pittsylvania vocational agriculture teacher, completed all his high school requirements last year, but remained on at Chatham High School for another year because no college would accept him at his age.

Recently, he and other Chatham seniors took a battery of Air Force aptitude tests. The results, disclosed this week, showed Mitchell made a perfect score on each of the four phases: mechanical, administrative, electronic, and general.

Air Force officials said other perfect scores have been posted before, but never by a 15-year-old.

Henry, however, was disappointed. He was hoping the tests would show his strongest and weakest fields.

Now that he's had that extra year of high school, he plans to enter Virginia Tech next fall and study electrical engineering, following in the footsteps of his brother, John, now an Air Force jet pilot.

Mrs. Mitchell, an artist, started both her sons and a daughter reading at the age of three. They all made A's throughout school.

Henry got off to the fastest start. He had been in school only six weeks when he was promoted to the third grade after reading first from a newspaper and then from the Bible for stunned first- and second-grade teachers.

Notes

The above Associated Press - distributed article appeared, among other newspapers, on the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It resulted from a press release from SSgt. Billy Biggerstaff, Air Force recruiter in Danville, Virginia. SSgt. Biggerstaff had administered the aptitude tests to Chatham High School's seniors. The Register, Danville, Virginia, published a feature article titled “Henry Mitchell Makes Perfect Score In U.S. Air Force Aptitude Tests,” of which this Associated Press dispatch is a condensation.
Henry Mitchell comments that in its condensation the article became inaccurate in several points:
- He only applied to one college, Virginia Tech, and his application was rejected because he was under 16 years old. However, at the same time, Virginia Tech did admit an even-younger student from an urban high school. That student, a later acquaintance of Henry's, was graduated magna cum laude in aerospace engineering, while having served as commander of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets' Band Company (the Highty-Tighties) and known as the genius designer of the Highty-Tighties' complex on-field halftime routines. “Virginia Tech judged correctly,” says Henry. “He was obviously ready for entry into Virginia Tech. In retrospect, I was not.”
- Thus, Henry was not kept in school because he was too smart. He simply was not admitted into Virginia Tech because he was too young, and they did not make an exception for him.
- Henry and both his older siblings (John and Joan) all had the same experience, in that they entered Spring Garden School in the third grade. Henry recalls that principal Lawrence Neeley initially decided that he should enter the fourth grade based on testing. However, superintendent of Pittsylvania County's public schools Harry Elmore ruled that he must enter the third grade, because school board policy did not permit skipping more than two grades. “No complaints,” says Henry. “It all worked out great.”
- Skipping grades was not all that unusual at Spring Garden School. Typically it occurred when the individual began school, or at graduation. Two members of Henry's class accumulated sufficient credits and completed all required courses so that they could skip their senior year to be graduated early; one member of the previous class had done so. The schools consolidated prior to Henry's senior year 1964-65, and he attended Chatham High. There, two years later in 1967, his wife-to-be Patricia completed her credits and was graduated one year early.
- Henry followed his brother John's footsteps to Virginia Tech and into the U.S. Air Force. John was a pilot, but Henry had imperfect eyesight and instead served as an electronics officer. John was a physics major at Virginia Tech, whereas Henry majored in electrical engineering.
- Their mother Mary was an artist, as the article reports, but she also had been an elementary school teacher before she married. Female teachers at that time in Virginia were not permitted to be married, so she left the classroom — but she, in effect, turned their home into a perpetual classroom. “She and Dad covered most of the basics of both elementary and high school academics before I entered school,” says Henry. Higher math, the lab sciences, and typing were new subjects to me when I entered high school, but most of the rest was already familiar due to their introducing it to me early. When I was six years old and being tested for grammar, I was disappointed that the written test I took was graded only 96, not 100 — I had been confident of my fourth-grade language competence — until I was told that the test was actually the final exam for senior English students. That was proof that Mom and Dad had not held back on delivering academic content — whatever I could absorb, and quite a bit I couldn't absorb yet. They had been raised in the one-room school era which did not include segregation by age, and Mom had taught in a one-room school. Their teaching philosophy was very different from that of so-called modern education. As far as they were concerned, anybody could learn anything, anytime.”
- Henry reports that many decades later he still gets questions about the Danville and AP articles. “Mostly the questions involve exaggerated memories of news reports that were exaggerated in the first place,” says Henry.
The actual test results are pictured at right.
Research assistance is provided by Sarah E. Mitchell, VintageDesigns.com