New housing developments, coupled with the baby boom of elevated birth rates, produced soaring school enrollments. By 1960, fully 39 % of the population in Nassau County was under 18 years old, for a total of 524,976 children. There were more children in Nassau County than total residents in Cincinnati, Denver or Atlanta. In the fastest-growing districts, the sheer number of babies became a running joke. Critics nicknamed Levittown“ Fertile Acres,” calling childbearing its“ major industry.” Residents referred to pregnancy as“ the Levittown look.”
For school districts, the bumper crop of children was no laughing matter. To build schools, districts relied on the municipal bond market. With rising enrollments, no federal aid for school construction and minimal support from the state government, local officials had little choice but to borrow from Wall Street. Municipal bonds allowed districts to spread costs over decades, rather than make one massive appropriation from property taxes. Despite these advantages, debt ultimately made school construction more expensive than it would have been with direct grants from the state or federal governments. School bonds conscripted taxpayers into paying fees to bankers and attorneys, as well as tax-exempt interest payments to investors. For a typical 30-year bond, fees and interest added between 30 % and 60 % to the total costs, depending on the exact interest rate.
Municipal debt exacerbated inequality in two key ways. First, it produced spatial inequalities. The interest rate that a district paid for its bonds varied based on how investors evaluated its creditworthiness. Even among all-white suburbs on Long Island, creditors sorted municipalities into a hierarchy based on their attractiveness as investments, molding school districts into abstract commodities so that investors could compare them from afar. Through this credit rating process, investors charged poor districts higher rates than wealthy districts. As a result, the disparities between poor and wealthy districts widened with each bond sale.
Second, municipal bonds created inequalities across time. Baseline interest rates fluctuated with broader macroeconomic trends. Whereas the average district could sell its bonds for just 1 % or 2 % interest during the immediate postwar years, already by the mid-1950s rates had
The first new school in Levittown consisted of eight Quonset huts, 1948.
risen to 3 % or 4 % in response to stricter monetary policy from the Federal Reserve. This increase might seem modest, but at the time the jump from 2 % to 4 % felt like a doubling of borrowing costs.
Rapid housing construction in an agricultural region with meager infrastructure created a severe crisis of school overcrowding. All 56 school districts in Nassau County experienced an influx, but the pressure was most severe in Levittown. When the enrollment shot up from 38 students in 1947 to 482 students in 1948, the school board scrambled to locate enough classrooms. In a panic, officials purchased eight surplus Quonset huts and strung the cylindrical sheds together in two long columns to serve as a provisional elementary school.
The Quonset hut school proved just the beginning of the turmoil in Levittown. In 1949, the enrollment doubled to 992 students. Officials moved first graders into the basement of the Levittown Community Church, partitioned the playroom of the Quonset hut into seven classrooms, shipped older students to high schools in neighboring districts and canceled kindergarten altogether. Even with these adjustments, every grade, first through eighth, remained on double sessions for the entire year. In 1950 the enrollment tripled to 3,013 students, and classes overflowed into libraries, cafeterias, gymnasiums and offices.
With enrollments soaring, Levittown officials repeatedly turned to the bond market. In New York, as in most states, a district borrowed funds by issuing general obligation bonds, through which a district pledged all its taxable real estate as collateral for the loans. Before issuing a bond, the state constitution required officials to obtain taxpayer authorization in a bond election. In these campaigns, a common tactic was to disseminate blueprints, the idea being to help voters envision what their property taxes would produce. In one such pamphlet, the Levittown School Board inscribed a promise alongside the drawings:“ These buildings will help prevent the overcrowded classrooms and / or multiple sessions that would otherwise result.” The assurance resonated with harried parents. Between 1948 and 1957, Levittown voters approved 11 bonds to finance 15 new schools.
After securing taxpayer authorization, districts obtained the funds by floating the issue on the bond market. Districts sold their bonds through competitive bidding, a process that required attracting the attention of investors. Whereas large cities employed entire departments to manage their bond sales, school districts outsourced these tasks to consultants. As part-time volunteers, school board members had neither the time nor the technical expertise for debt administration. In exchange for fees, the consultants handled all the logistics, from drafting contracts to printing advertisements in the financial
Levittown Public Library www. MoAF. org | Fall 2025 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 17