Before I was hired as a \u201creal teacher\u201d with my own classroom in 1973, I worked as a classroom aide in Thousand Oaks, California, which is a rather affluent community. My 22-mile commute from Thousand Oaks to Oxnard, California, was in many ways, and on some days, worlds apart.<\/p>\n

My first-grade students\u201427 of them\u2014were a rich tapestry of cultures: black, white, Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Cambodian. They spoke English, Spanish and Spanglish, Vietnamese and Cambodian. Some parents were \u201cblue-collar\u201d workers, some moms did \u201cdaycare,\u201d some parents worked in the fields of the Oxnard plain, one family owned a Mexican restaurant just down the street from the school, and I think there were some parents who\u2014for whatever reason\u2014did not work. \u201cFamily\u201d was defined in a variety of ways: two-parent families, single-parent families, and kids being raised by grandparents. Although I had a teaching license, I was not fully prepared for this classroom setting!El Rio Elementary School was a Title\u00a01 school, and it had money to provide a variety of support services to students\u2014bilingual education, academic support in reading and math, and some social work services. Most kids were on free or reduced lunch. At that time, breakfast wasn\u2019t offered at El Rio Elementary and, as a result, if someone was hungry, the school offered cartons of milk and crackers as needed.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, as a young, inexperienced, and impressionable teacher, I worked with a caring and strong staff\u2014teachers, support personnel (bilingual classroom assistants who worked closely with teachers to support kids and their learning), a \u201cTitle\u00a01\u201d director, and a terrific principal who led our school team to ensure that everyone operated with a \u201ckids first\u201d perspective.<\/p>\n

Although Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April\u00a04, 1968, in those early years of my teaching there was no such holiday as MLK Day. Four days after King was assassinated, Representative John Conyers (Democrat, Michigan) and Senator Edward Brooke (Republican, Massachusetts) introduced the first bill for a King federal holiday. That bill failed; efforts to gather support for this national holiday took many years. In 1979, Coretta Scott King testified at congressional hearings, and support continued to grow. In 1981, musician Stevie Wonder endorsed the effort in a big way. He wrote and produced new music for Happy Birthday.<\/p>\n