Public schooling in the Unites States of America has long been the site of more than just meeting the academic needs of the country’s youth. Among the many roles the school house has played in the history of public schooling in the United States is the mechanism to deliver non-instructional services to students. School-delivered, non-instructional services are those services that extend beyond addressing the academically-disposed, educational needs of children and aim to meet the social, emotional, and physical needs of young people while they are in the care of educators. Through an historical example grounded primarily in archival research, I establish a genealogy of school-delivered, non-instructional services by examining how staffing developed in the Cobb County School District in Cobb County, Georgia during the 1938-39 to 1976-77 time period. I will point to the role of federal involvement in public education and the professionalization of social services during this time period to connect the changes that occur in the instructional employees and non-instructional employees, with a specific examination of lunchroom employees and counselors, in one school system
