The School by the Avenue
Located one block from the historic boulevard, my school, Thomas Jefferson High School, is only a fifteen minute walk from Monument’s most recent addition, a bronze-casted statue of the great athlete and philanthropist Arthur Ashe. Portrayed with books and tennis racket in hand and standing in front of a group of children, this monument starkly contrasts those valorizing Confederate generals.
Once lauded as the second best high school in the state, Tee-Jay is located in the more affluent West End of the city through which Monument runs north to south. As Daniel Duke writes in his book The School that Refused to Die covering the dynamic history of Tee-Jay from 1930 to 1993, “Tee-Jay’s once well-defined [pre-busing] image began to blur into a general picture of urban high schools around the nation—schools beset by declining enrollment, white flights, and inadequate resources.3 Even still, the prestige acknowledged in the past has not fully escaped Tee-Jay, and as a result Tee-Jay serves one of the more diverse populations of Richmond’s comprehensive schools. Our school consists of students from middle-class, working-class, and poor families living below the poverty line. I plan to teach this unit to my juniors studying American Literature, and I hope to teach it both to my advanced and standard-level classes. The unit is designed for a total of 12 hours in class over the span of three weeks.
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