It meant a lot to me that Michelle Obama was looking at Georgetown Day School for her daughters. I was a student there in the very early years of the school. We lived in DC because my parents both worked for the government during WWII, and the schools in Washington were not good. They located the only private school in the area that accepted Negro kids--that's the word we used at the time.
Georgetown was a tiny, fledgling experiment in progressive education. My first year--kindergarten--we met in the basement of a church, and most of the families were members of Roosevelt's New Deal. When it was time for songs, Philio Nash, who after the war became lieutenant governor of Minnestoa, I think, sat on a milk carton and taugt us union songs. In later years, I confused him with Burl Ives. The founder, a divorced woman with two grown sons and a boyfriend (wow, in 1944), ran an open classroom, so I got to do 4 years of arithmetic in first grade, and they didn't bother to make me read. Agnes King Ingles, the founder, also ran a summer camp for us all, since there were no vacations for government workers during wartime, and no air conditioning. It was non-competative and wonderful.
Now GDS is a fancy private school, but it is important to connect the early days of this progressive little school to the visit from the first lady-elect. Aggie, as we knew her, is smiling.