April 1925—THIS MONTH IN SCOPES HISTORY

Last Updated 4/2/2025


RCHS principal and biology teacher William Ferguson gets sick and misses two weeks of school in April. Ferguson’s substitute teacher is first-year teacher and football coach John Scopes.

After coaching, a couple of Scopes students in Ferguson's biology, general science and physics classes wrote that,Scopes taught them near this time that “the evidence upon which scientists base their theory of evolution, that is that all animal life is a gradual development from the simple to the highly complex animals, and probably culminating in man.”


May 1, 1925—THIS DAY IN SCOPES HISTORYAfter a “good though hardly remarkable first year,” John Scopes’s contract ends at RCHS, but he stays in town to help two students injur...
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