Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE-THE COLLEGE AND THE DEVELOPING, MODERN EDUCATION SYSTEM - The modernization of financial management
140 SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE favor of applying for the state grant in order to protect their own income and for this reason they were the ones who raised the issue from time to time. In the other camp were the church district leaders, together with the leaders of the College, all of them - most notably István Fejes, assistant lay officer, later bishop - wanting to preserve the College’s autonomy. By 1909, however, the situation was utterly unmanageable and the request for state aid could no longer be postponed. A seemingly favourable contract -according to at least some of the terms - was drawn up. The school would receive fifty thousand crowns in aid from the state but, because the contributions of the church and the school represented a larger sum than the aid from the state, the religious character of the institutions and its autonomy would not be affected. According to the agreement, the Ministry of National Education and Religion (MNER) could appoint five out of sixteen teachers after having publicly advertised the position. The ministry, furthermore, retained the right to oversee and monitor matters of the College. Despite the numerous benefits issuing from this agreement, this development was described in the College bulletin as “the death knell for the College’s independence”. Unfortunately, even this way the difficulty was only partially solved, given that the MNER was unable to fulfill its contractual obligations, supplying only four thousand crowns in 1912 and eight thousand crowns the next year. Teachers’ pensions were not provided consistently, either, so, at the threshold of World War I, these amounts also weighed on the church district’s balance sheets. From an economic perspective, the school survived World War I in a relatively unscathed condition. Naturally, no one could keep up with the escalating prices and the leadership in Patak repeatedly urged the state to supply the funding which it had promised. The rapid rise in food prices had led to the institution taking matters into its own hands and organizing the supply of food supplies once again in a way previously described. Thus, the dining-hall was ensured of receiving the needed foodstuffs. In addition to the forbidding prices, the shortage of labour reached worrying heights in 1916. The men were on the battlefields and the school was forced to hire women and prisoners in their stead. Even such, there still were not enough working hands and certain positions simply could not be properly filled. The interests due on loans also lagged in arriving and the situation deteriorated month after month. The firewood needed for heating had run out by the last year of the war and the winter recess had to be extended. By the time the Popular Republic of Hungary came into being, the College’s treasury was entirely depleted. Furthermore, the Czech soldiers assigned to serve in the town were inflicting serious damage. Yet, the greatest threat was the devaluation of money and the introduction of war bonds. The income earned by the College from interest and leases decreased to one percent of the total income perceived in previous years. Over the course of the last seven decades, the College had gone through remarkable tranformations in its mode of financial management, yet it ended up where it had started: at the brink of total bankruptcy.
