{"id":10843,"date":"2018-10-21T20:10:42","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T00:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/news\/?p=10843"},"modified":"2019-06-20T13:00:21","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T17:00:21","slug":"large-community-turnout-for-ferdinand-t-day-dedication-ceremony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/news\/?p=10843","title":{"rendered":"Large Community Turnout for Ferdinand T. Day Dedication Ceremony"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ferdinand T. Day\u2019s family and members of the community joined students and parents from the new Ferdinand T. Day Elementary School<\/a>\u00a0on the West End on Thursday to officially dedicate the building in a moving ceremony.<\/p>\n

The school\u2019s 450 students sang, danced and showed off balancing skills<\/a> to a large crowd that included Ferdinand T. Day\u2019s daughter Gwen Day-Fuller and family members, City Council members, Congressman Don Beyer, and Deborah S. Delisle, Executive Director and CEO of ASCD and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education under President Barack Obama. The crowd stood to hear the Black National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” sung by the T.C. Williams High School Choir<\/a> in honor of the civil rights movement that drove change in Alexandria in the 1950s and 60s.<\/p>\n

The school is named after Ferdinand T. Day, a civil rights icon and education pioneer, who was appointed to the Alexandria City School Board just ten years after the Brown versus Board of Education decision. He became the first African American to be elected chair of a public school board in the Commonwealth of Virginia and was highly active in working towards the desegregation of Alexandria. Born in 1918 in Alexandria, he went to Parker-Gray School through eighth grade before continuing his secondary education in D.C. Public Schools because Alexandria offered no formal high school education for African Americans.<\/p>\n