After 75 Years, It’s Time to Celebrate at Banneker

After 75 Years, It’s Time to Celebrate at Banneker

By Leonard Shapiro

Banneker Principal Robert Carter

Banneker Elementary School on Snake Hill Road in St. Louis is celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2023. Robert Carter, its dynamic principal, has been delighted with the response from countless former students, teachers, administrators and parents past and present helping to mark this joyous benchmark.

More than 300 were expected to attend its annual potluck supper in early June. Many have sent photos and personal stories of their experiences at Banneker. They have included comments about a segregated school that served the area’s African-American community when it opened in 1948. It was finally integrated in 1968.

These days, there are 180 students in grades pre-kindergarten through five, and Principal Carter said it’s now 65 percent Caucasian, 25 percent Hispanic and ten percent African-American. The school serves families in Middleburg, St. Louis, Willisville and Philomont, with some students coming from as far away as Purcellville.

Carter commutes to Banneker from Round Hill, where he and wife, Elsie, an immigration attorney, and their three children make their home. He’s also working on a doctorate degree from William & Mary and is a career educator who said he found his true calling when he was a high school student in Winchester. He went on a mission trip to China with his church. The mission included some teaching, and he was hooked.

After serving as an assistant principal at Emerick Elementary in Purcellville, Carter came to Banneker in 2015. He’d been hired there by the school’s principal, Dawn Haddock, who also had been his fifth grade teacher.

“She pushed me out and said, ‘you’re ready for your own school,’” he said.

And was he ever.

Alfred Dodson, a Banneker student in 1948, and Principal Carter

“I followed a principal who’d been at Banneker for seven years,” he said. “I was young, but the staff here accepted me right away. I’m big in relationship building, and I think people appreciate that. I hired two people the first year, then three the next, about 25 percent of the staff. We lose people to promotions, retirements, people moving out of the area, so over the last eight years, I’ve probably hired about 90 percent of the staff.”

Within five years of his tenure, Banneker earned the coveted designation as a Continuous Improvement School by the Virginia State board because its test scores had increased each year for five straight years.

Then came the Covid pandemic, and Banneker weathered that storm, including going to remote learning from March through October 2020, a partial return for two months, and then a full-time return to the classroom in January, 2021.

“It hit us in ways we really had to respond to in terms of changes in the health care field, new requirements for the kids, a lot of different things,” Principal Carter said. “But, we got through it and got back to normal as soon as we could.”

Normal at Banneker these days is a dedicated, tight-knit staff, including several former Banneker students, and a diverse student body that also benefits from relatively small class sizes and all manner of extra-curricular activities.

“People who didn’t grow up in the school tell us it reminds them of the elementary schools they went to or their parents went to,” he said. “And people who have been around here for many years tell us this reminds them of a community center. Their children use our playgrounds. Adults use our running track to stay in shape. We try to make it a place where a lot of memories can be captured.”

This year the school has also celebrated the emergence of one of its graduates as a potential No. 1 draft choice in the National Basketball Association. That would be Jordan Miller, who grew up within walking distance, started playing in the Banneker gym and in March, helped lead his University of Miami team to the NCAA Final Four.

But most of all, said Principal Carter, “I think our parents appreciate knowing they’re educating their kids at what feels like a private school, but also is a public school.”

That’s something to celebrate, along with 75 years of meaningful history and a dedicated dynamo of a principal who wants to make more.