The Audacious Beginning

When GDS’s founders decided to open their own school in 1945, it was at first not out of some lofty educational vision, but a simple need and desire by a group of parents to better educate their children. 

Between the budget-starved, crowded, segregated public schools of a wartime Washington D.C., and the elitist, segregated private schools, these parents didn’t find much choice. Though the private schools were less crowded and may have had better teachers, they still lacked the experiences of diversity and of the absence of prejudice they all wanted for their children. To these diverse founding families, anthropologists and gifted teachers among them, the idea of sending their children to a segregated school was unthinkable. They needed to create something that didn’t yet exist in the District, and had no model. 

Edith Nash, Georgetown Day School’s second Head of School, said GDS’s founding mission was: “to do two things simultaneously: educate our children in spite of segregation, crowding, conflict, and elitism; the other was to confront the issues of racism, elitism, and educational indifference in the nation’s capital by creating and maintaining a viable community of parents, teachers, and children.” 

Their school would be parent-owned and cooperative, with an educational program that extended beyond the classroom and made use of the city’s resources. “...All families, regardless of their race or religion, would hold equal shares in this joint-stock venture.”

But however bold and radical the idea and the undertaking, in GDS’s beginning years, their focus was mainly on survival. That meant, according to Philleo Nash, Edith’s husband and GDS’s first Board Chair, no overspending, hiring teachers to get tax exemption, and “...keeping a wary eye on the House District Committee which was still dominated by conservative segregationist Southern Senators who did not look favorably on school integration in the District of Columbia.”

“Chairman McMillan (D.-S.C.) and other Congressmen had a stake in their own district to keep segregation intact in the Nation’s Capital,” he said. “The fact that we were doing something that the other private schools did not dare and the public schools were not able to do was a threat to them.”

Beyond integration, the intent of GDS’s founders was to build a school that instilled respect for individual differences into every aspect of school life. One of the ways they did this was to be not only racially inclusive, but culturally and religiously inclusive as well—by sharing in the joyous celebration of each other’s cultural and religious holidays. And they insisted that those days of joy would be commemorated authentically. The idea was to move beyond just religious tolerance to a deeper respect and mutual understanding. Their school was to be a safe haven where students of varied races, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds could all come together to learn, as free as possible from the prejudices of the outside world, and that this would not only help them learn, but help them learn to be better people, and to create a foundation for a better society. 

But maintaining a safe environment of mutual respect, trust and affection is demanding, and requires the vigilance of all – teachers and students alike. With outside social and political tensions often casting a long shadow, it has always been a struggle. Over the years, GDS has managed to keep working towards that original vision by baking that practice into the every day: from its religious and secular celebrations, even the ones created by its students, to its assemblies that focus on social justice, authenticity, and being kind, to the myriad parent volunteers that contribute to the school’s vibrant community on a nearly daily basis.