Another educator very important to the early promotion of the WCTS was Wayne County School Commissioner Eber Yost, and his office—like Cody’s—was subsequently written into the charter of the WCTS to always sit as a member on its administrative board. In his first 18 years of duty as commissioner, Yost’s own carriage conveyed him around the county to all his visits, frequently in the company of Superintendent Cody, and two other highly influential Michigan educators—future governor Woodbridge Ferris, and Henry Pattengill. ²¹  Yost believed in enlarging the scope of the district school system and tying it in with the education system of the state, that it might benefit by the general progress of scholarship and methods of teaching. As Wayne County School Commissioner, he began raising the standards of rural schools to fit their pupils to progress to high school, and university training. ²²  Yost also spoke out in favor of establishing the WCTS, and of a need for specialized education in general, saying that the feebleminded child “not only retards the work of the school, but often is a menace,” citing the frequency with which such children run afoul of the courts when they cannot be engaged in successful education. ²³

          Governor Ferris during his second inaugural address in 1915 stated, “A careful study of social conditions in Michigan as revealed through the industrial schools, the prisons, the asylums, and the homes of the epileptics and feebleminded is not altogether encouraging.” He went on to call for better, more specialized care and housing of the mentally defective and the construction of new facilities for them, for the removal of the mentally defective from the prisons, and the removal of the criminals from the industrial training schools to the prisons. Ferris went on to suggest that the Boys’ and Girls’ Industrial Schools at Lansing and Adrian could then have their penal features removed, since they were at present largely occupied by mental defectives, and returned to their original missions of training youth to useful positions in society. So his vision was not too far removed from what the founders of the WCTS were trying to accomplish. Ferris had a long background as an educator, and in 1884 founded the Big Rapids Industrial School, today known as Ferris State University. He supported the founding of a federal Department of Education, and under his administration established the aforementioned Wahjamega Farm Colony for Epileptics at the behest of the Thursday Noon Group.

          Henry Pattengill was just as influential and beloved an educator in the state as Ferris, Cody, or Yost, and held the position of Superintendent of Public Instruction of Michigan. Pattengill shared the ideals of Yost and Ferris; that the public education system in Michigan should be made uniform, and as accessible to rural residents as easily as those of the city. One could easily speculate as to the conversations that might have taken place to pass the time while bumping along in Mr. Yost’s carriage in the 1890s that could have presaged the developments of ensuing years. It would hardly be a coincidence if they had shared ideas and discussed mental defectiveness, education of the “uneducable,” etc., nor should it be seen as much of a fluke that they and their ideas became intertwined with, and involved with those of the Thursday Nooners, Mr. Maybury, or Mr. Alexander, ultimately leading to the creation of the WCTS.

          Jeffrey Mirel’s The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907-81  makes the bold assertion that “virtually every major educational reform and innovation of the twentieth century took root and flourished in Detroit,” ²⁴  including standardized testing, Americanization classes, night schooling for adults, and vocational education, and one will note that almost all of them were brought about under Frank Cody’s superintendency. Among the advances that he implemented to that end included an unprecedented cooperation between schools and industry, and the formation of part-time trade schools within the public schools. These ideas came to be among the central tenets of the WCTS program as well; whose motto was "We Learn By Doing." It was Cody's idea that schools cooperate with industry in this manner to ensure that every student left the school system equipped to make a living in one field or another. According to a 1929 article, “That same ideal has been responsible for the establishment of schools for the handicapped—for the sub-normal, anemic, blind, deaf and crippled children, as well as open air schools for the physically weak.” ²⁵