Good morning, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to publish a Contributor Column from Linda Moore, the founder of the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Public Charter School in Washington, DC.
We provide a bio for Linda below.
Linda Moore is the founder of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, a two-campus charter in Washington, DC, named for her mother who taught in segregated schools in Arkansas and the freedom schools born out of the civil rights era. A public charter school pioneer in the nation’s capital–the District of Columbia passed one of the first charter laws in the mid-1990s–Moore’s commitment to providing high-quality urban public education spans decades.
Opening its doors in 1998,the school now educates more than 700 at two campuses in the Brookland and Marshall Heights-Lincoln Heights neighborhoods of Washington, DC. A dual language immersion program, the school teaches pre-K through fifth grade students to think, speak, write and learn simultaneously in two languages, French and English or Spanish and English alongside a commitment to social justice.
Today, Moore is School Ambassador of the program she founded and ran as Executive Director from 1998 to 2013. Moore serves on the board of the DC Charter School Alliance, and previously served on the boards of the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools, Friends of Choice in Urban Schools and the DC Special Education Cooperative. In 2013, Moore was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Long time CharterFolk readers will remember that we featured Linda in a CharterFolk Extraordinaire post in 2020.
It’s our honor to share a little more Moore with you.
New Leadership for This New School Year
As our nation contemplates potentially electing its first woman president, the daughter of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, our thoughts at Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School turn to the similarly bold new trajectories we plan for our students. A short time ago, our doors opened for the school’s 27th academic year with a new leader to carry forward our school‘s mission and vision.
This quarter-century plus school serves pre-K to fifth grade students in a dual-language immersion program by teaching our young scholars to think, speak, write and learn simultaneously in two languages, French and English or Spanish and English, alongside a strong commitment to social justice.
My inspiration for starting this new school was my mother, a first-grade teacher in Arkansas’ then-segregated school system.
At that time, the evidence and my experience, combined with my work with education policy leaders, informed me that many District of Columbia public schools were failing to adequately serve the District’s children, especially Black and Brown students. I also was acutely aware that my grandsons were of preschool age, motivating me to make a difference.
From that first thought through today, our school became a firm fixture on the District’s public education landscape, growing one grade each year from 35 kindergarten and first grade students in a church basement to 700 students on two campuses serving students through the fifth grade. Publicly funded and independently-run, charter schools were the District’s first wave of public education reform in the mid-1990s when facilities were hard to come by for pioneers like us.
I laid the school’s foundations, then my daughter–Elsie Whitlow Stokes’ granddaughter–took the helm in 2013, building on my groundwork.
Erika, a Spelman college alumna with an education degree from Harvard, raised the funds required to sustain and expand the school’s popular educational program, opening our East End campus, the first language immersion public school east of the Anacostia river. She also led the school through the covid pandemic’s challenges and back to bricks-and-mortar schooling.
This school year, as Erika focuses on new development and citywide education initiatives, our board tapped Bobby Caballero, a 24-year veteran of the school, as Head of Schools.
Along with a number of our students, Bobby is a first-generation immigrant, arriving here with his family from Cuba, at six-months old. Like Vice President Harris and some of our alumni, he is a Howard University graduate.
Mr. Caballero was instrumental in the teamwork restoring the school’s in person culture and spirit once we were all able to learn and grow together again post-pandemic, having successfully weathered the covid storm.
Known to our students as ‘Mr. Bobby,’ he is an integral member of the team that leads and supports our annual 5th-grade international study tours to Martinique and Panama. Alongside his colleagues, he helps students explore environmental stewardship, the treatment of indigenous and historically enslaved populations, and social justice for those furthest from opportunity, all while immersing themselves in the languages and cultures of these vibrant regions.
Bobby’s people skills helped sustain a team effort that built partnerships in the communities where our two campuses, in the Brookland and Marshall Heights – Lincoln Heights neighborhoods are located, developing alliances to foster deeper thinking and learning and bringing the school’s social justice mission to scale.
There is a long list of partnerships that Bobby fostered and created. In a prior partnership with Ritz-Carlton, students learned about careers in hospitality, nutrition, the food web, and about making a difference through their Community Footprints Program. Working with Habitat for Humanity, students learned about homelessness, raising funds to help build a home for a family of three.
Food insecurity and nutrition desert issues also form part of students’ learning experiences. By joining forces with Martha’s Table, our students distribute healthy choices to families in need.
E.W. Stokes School also was one of the first to participate in the National Park Trust’ Buddy Bison. This program encourages students to enjoy the outdoors and become stewards of the national parks.
Bobby’s teamwork actualizes the school’s commitment to nurturing students’ resilience, empathy and camaraderie through extra-curricular activities as the Boys’ Book Club, after-school trips to DC’s Kennedy Center and author book readings and signings.
Strengthening our students for the future in these and countless other ways, alongside the academic rigor of a language immersion education, prepares them for middle and high school, college and beyond. E.W. Stokes School is one of five feeder schools, meaning students can access preferred placement, to DC International, a highly-acclaimed language immersion middle and high school where students specialize in French, Spanish or Mandarin.
Our alumni–the first graduating class is now entering their 30s–are graduates of many distinguished higher education institutions. From Georgetown, Howard and George Washington locally, to Spelman, Xavier, NOLA, and Morehouse further afield, to Ivy League Harvard and Columbia, our students are the professionals, active global citizens and community-focused neighbors of tomorrow.
The school programs we provide are highly sought after by District-resident families eligible for our tuition-free public education. As a result, our 700 available spots are filled through the My School DC Lottery system, and we typically have around 1,000 students on the waitlist.
Mr. Caballero talks about the E.W. Stokes School “special sauce” that brings together the ingredients necessary to make our high-performing program. Passing stewardship of the school’s leadership to him, recognized as a New Leader Rockstar by the DC Charter School Alliance, enables us to further develop our unique model for urban public education, building a world of social justice at home and abroad one child at a time.