When Virginia Walden Ford crossed the threshold of her new high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, as one of the second wave of black students to integrate the school, little did she know these were her first steps in a lifetime journey to champion educational opportunity for all children.
Ford would go on to help nearly 9,000 children attend their school of choice in Washington, D.C., and her story would be featured in the forthcoming movie “Miss Virginia.”
During the 1990s, Ford was a single mom of three children in Washington, D.C. She was shocked at the condition of the local public schools, where eighth-graders were performing three grade levels below their peers across the nation in mathematics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. READ MORE