Virginia Walden Ford’s is the Great American Story
Virginia Walden Ford’s is the great American story, she’s on the right side of it, and it’s dramatically well-told in the new movie Miss Virginia. In the movie, Emmy winner Uzo Aduba plays Ford as she—sick and tired of being treated as if she’s incompetent to choose her own child’s school—rises in righteous rebellion and seizes control of her own affairs again by fighting for school choice in Washington, D.C., in a grand renewal of the American ideal of citizenship.
As also told in her forthcoming autobiography School Choice: A Legacy to Keep, “Miss Virginia” was an already-struggling single mother from a low-income neighborhood who decided to take on yet another struggle—to seek another option for the education of her teen boy. She was highly dissatisfied with the public school he was assigned to attend. She very much feared that he might be on his way to a life of drug dealing and all of that which too often follows. She couldn’t afford the tuition at other, nearby private schools, however.
Overcoming several obstacles, including her own fear of public speaking and the powerful educational establishment, Ford and the D.C. Parents for School Choice group she formed in the late 1990s sought to secure educational opportunity for her child, at another school, of her choosing. It was a story known to Bradley, which supported similar groups in Milwaukee and elsewhere; it helped fund D.C. Parents for School Choice, too.
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Tags: Beaufort Books, Beaufort in the Press, Miss Virginia, School Choice: A Legacy to Keep, Virginia Walden Ford