The ladies of the Society of Beneficence ran School Homes, large austere buildings with drafty corridors and opaque windows so that the children inside could neither see out nor be seen. Clothed in identical drab uniforms, heads frequently shaven, they received more training than education: the emphasis was on school as work, workshop, sweatshop. Girls labored long hours sewing layettes for the wealthy society ladies who ran the asylums. Children often left the asylums only at Christmastime to stand on street corners and beg money for the Society of Beneficence. Nor were the children the only ones exploited. A Congressional report in 1939 revealed that some employees of the Society of Beneficence worked 12 to 14 hours daily with a day off only every 10 or 15 days. Some had no days off and earned between 45-90 pesos at a time when the minimum wage was 120 pesos.
For Evita, the emphasis was on creating a home as a safe haven for children.
We say that the eyes are the windows of the soul; the architecture of the twenty Home Schools (Hogares Escuela) established by the Fundación during the seven years before the 1955 Coup showed that the creation of a home was the nucleus or soul of these havens. Children went to public schools and maintained family ties whenever possible. lntegration, not segregation, was the core of the Home Schools.

The architecture of the Home Schools reflected their openness to society. The hedge around the buildings was never more than a meter high. The buildings themselves were typical Fundación architecture: they were like the California mission style, wide and airy, full of light, with red tiled roofs, white walls and green lawns. The interior decoration was of the highest quality, with marble walls and oak beds, mosaics and tiles which still stand after fifty years of abandonment and neglect. Cheerful tablecloths and an abundance of flowers, murals made to delight the eyes of a child, books and toys, all helped create a homelike atmosphere.
Home Schools sheltered about 16,000 children at a time when the population of Argentina was about 16 million and were built where the socioeconomic need was the greatest. Parents who wished their children to attend home schools had to write to Evita personally (they had to take the initiative) and while the Home School was being constructed social workers and home visitors visited the homes to corroborate the family's situation and evaluate its needs.

The Fundación set a scale of priorities for admittance:

- Material or moral abandonment
- Illness of parents or guardians
- Extreme poverty
- Orphans
- Irregular home life or separation of mother and father
- Environmental causes (unhealthy living conditions or lack of basic necessities)
- Economic instability caused by unemployment
- Parents unable to care for children due to physical disability or illness
- Advanced age of parents or guardians
- Parent/s incarcerated

The children were admitted from age four to age ten (ages six to ten at Ezeiza). Children with physical or psychological problems were derived to the appropriate institutions and their treatment was paid for by the Fundación.
Social workers worked with the family before and during the child's stay at the Hogar Escuela.
Evita did not want any child to be isolated from the world. All children were to have a nuclear family outside of the Hogar where they could spend weekends and holidays. If the child had no parents or could not return home for whatever reason, then a guardian was found for the child.
Upon admittance, a complete medical workup was done for each child and after the first checkup, the children received two checkups a month with the emphasis on preventive medicine. Doctors, nurses, dentists, dietitians and hygienists were responsible for the health of all Hogar staff as well as the children.


The Hogar accommodated day children (who returned to their homes for dinner and to spend the night) and residents. All children received clothing (no uniforms except the white smock which all Argentine children wear to public schools), shoes, books and school supplies, medications when necessary. Resident children were those who were poorest or who lived too far away to be transported on a daily basis. Day children were those whose parents were able to provide them with the basic necessities.
Supplemental education, reinforcement, tutoring was available as needed, but the children were transported by school bus to public schools.
When in the Hogar, the children were organized in groups of fifteen, with a preceptor, a kind of "nanny" , in charge of each group. The children wore street clothing of their choice. Everything possible was done to avoid the "asylum mentality" so prevalent during the years of the Society of Beneficence. The children were not stigmatized or made to stand out in any way (no shaven heads, no begging for funds).
By 1954, the Department of Education had to make plans for first groups of Hogar children who had completed their primary education and were ready for high school. The Foundation only had one Home for male High School Students, la Ciudad Estudiantil, in Buenos Aires (these young people lived in the Ciudad Estudiantil but were bused to local high schools during the day). More Ciudades Estudiantiles were planned but had not yet been built. The Ministry of Education derived the students, according to aptitudes and vocation, to appropriate high schools.

Since High School Homes for young women had not yet been completed, girls were allowed to continue in the Hogar as day students.
The Hogar continued to give them clothes, food, medical attention, school supplies and books during their high school years; these privileges were lost if the girls received a fail in any school subject. Therefore, their grades were closely monitored and they were carefully supervised and tutored after school "just as any patient and intelligent mother would do for her children."
Supplementary after school classes such as dancing, folk dancing, cooking and sewing, music, and art were held three times a week. Students were to be allowed to freely choose whatever interested them the most. The director of the Hogar was under strict orders to encourage the young women to continue their studies at university level at the Ciudad Universitaria de Córdoba.

Of course, after the military coup of 1955, much of Evita's work was destroyed or expropriated for the use of the military, and the Society of Beneficence mentality became once again the order of the day. The military, like the Bourbons, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Evita, sadly and prophetically, had once said, "I leave them the easiest task: that of changing the signs." If only they had been content to change the signs on the buildings and leave the works intact!