NPR – Joanne Levine
“It’s morning meeting time. “When Dr. King was little, he learned a golden rule,” sings a class of 4- and 5-year-olds with their teacher, Carolyn Barnhardt. John Eaton Elementary School, a public school in Washington, D.C., is unusual. It sits in one of the District’s wealthiest neighborhoods, but the majority of students hail from different parts of the city, making it one of the most racially and economically diverse elementary schools in the nation’s capital. Barnhardt, who has been a prekindergarten teacher for 25 years, remembers a time when schools were not so diverse. “I am part of the Dr. Martin Luther King era,” she says, explaining how she grew up in the segregated South. “I experienced the white-only water fountains, the colored section in the bus station. The lunch counters — I remember not being able to sit there to eat lunch. And I went to the colored-only schools, it was all — everything was segregated.”(more)