 Enrollment in high schools in Seattle increased from 872 to 10,885 over the course of Cooper's tenure, and the system as a whole grew from 21 buildings for 10,017 pupils to 98 buildings for 42,241.He instituted a program of teaching English to the foreign-born parents of children in the school and felt that "any really effective scheme of Americanization must include reaching the home of foreign people using a language other than English, in our community, and one influential means of reaching such homes is by way of the mothers and through the cooperation of the children attending American schools from those homes".He also fought against a plan floated by the school board to have a permanently segregated building for teaching of foreign students, arguing that they should instead be integrated into the regular classes as soon as their English skills warranted.