76 Years Later

When my son was three years old, I got an invitation from a family who runs a local preschool out of their home to visit and see if their school was a good fit for us. The husband and wife were parents of a classmate of my older son, who was already in Elementary school. We had briefly been introduced earlier that year. 

My two boys and I got in the car one Saturday and drove to their house in a nearby neighborhood of Los Angeles. When we arrived, their 6 year-old daughter was peering out from their window, waiting for us to arrive. We had a fun visit and I enrolled my youngest son in their school. 

A few months later, as the national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. was approaching, I felt moved to share a story with my son’s new teacher about my grandmother. She had been a teacher at the first school to integrate in Virginia four years before the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case had outlawed school segregation. The school, Burgundy Farm Country Day School in Alexandria, had been started by a group of 12 concerned families who wanted an alternative education for their children. The decision to integrate four years later drove away some of the founding families, but the school's decision to maintain a progressive vision persevered and they began actively recruiting a diverse student body and faculty. My son’s new preschool teacher had been a progressive educator his whole career and I thought this piece of history might interest him.

What I learned after sharing this story with him was beyond my wildest imagination. He told me that he was the grandson of a founding family of Burgundy Farm Country Day School. As we started discussing our families' connection to the school, we discovered that our fathers had attended at the same time. The connection was remarkable!

We exchanged stories about the school. My aunt had told me that in Alexandria at that time, the public swimming pool was still segregated, and on hot days, my grandmother would invite all the kids back to their house to cool off in the sprinklers on their front lawn. I never met my grandmother, but I heard that she was quite gregarious. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York to Polish and Russian parents. She later attended Cornell University, which is where she met my grandfather. They moved to Alexandria, a suburb of Washington, D.C., because my grandfather was working for the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. My grandmother was very active in the Democratic Party in Alexandria, which is how she had been offered the teaching job at Burgundy Farm.

The founders of Burgandy Farm had the vision to offer children “peace from fear—and an opportunity to develop courage and hope about themselves.” As the Washington Post reported at the 50 year anniversary of the school's integration, the students and faculty of color who had attended at that time remember it fondly. One student remembers "A whole live-and-let-live feeling permeated the place."

Today, the school is thriving. It operates on the same 26-acre campus where the first school building was converted from a dairy barn. The school's mission today is guided by the belief that "we are inherently connected to all people and the world around us" and it nurtures "a joy of learning, an appreciation for human diversity, and, on a campus in which every classroom opens to the outdoors, a sense of stewardship for the environment."

Burgandy Farm is not just an inspiring example of families organizing for a better future for their children. Its founding vision is also a remedy for intolerance.