Walker-Grant Middle School Ribbon-cutting Welcomes Guests, Awaits Students
Joseph Braggs drove all night from his home in Georgia to attend Wednesday morning’s ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Walker-Grant Middle School.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR & CORRESPONDENT
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Joseph Braggs drove all night from his home in Georgia to attend Wednesday morning’s ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Walker-Grant Middle School.
“I’m so honored to be here,” said Braggs, a Vietnam veteran and the great-great nephew of Joseph Walker, one of the Fredericksburg City middle school’s two namesakes.
Joseph Walker was born into slavery in Spotsylvania County, was entirely self-educated, and worked with Jason Grant, a Fredericksburg school teacher, to open the Fredericksburg Normal and Industrial Institute – the city’s first high school for Black students – in 1905.
Braggs said his family was a beneficiary of Walker’s enthusiasm for education. “He paid for my grandmother to go to nursing school,” Braggs told those gathered for Wednesday’s ribbon cutting, and he inspired Braggs himself to eventually earn three college degrees.
In 1938, when the Fredericksburg Normal and Industrial School merged with the city’s Black elementary school, the entire school was renamed in honor of Walker and Grant. That building, which still stands at Gunnery Road, became the middle school for all of Fredericksburg City when the school division was integrated in 1968.
In 1988, the names and legacies of Walker and Grant were carried over to the building at Learning Lane when it was completed to house a growing middle school population. And they are carrying over once again to the brand new Walker-Grant Middle School, which celebrated its ribbon cutting today and which will open for students in 13 days.
“Keeping the original name is a tribute to the legacies of Joseph Walker and Jason Grant,” said Fredericksburg Mayor Kerry Devine. “It continues the dreams and aspirations of the namesakes, but it’s also a blank slate,” a place where a new generation of students will hopefully find inspiration to write their own legacies, she said.
The school is so brand-spanking new that teachers only found their workspaces a few hours before the ribbon cutting, deputy superintendent Matt Eberhardt said. It’s getting ready to welcome 870 middle school students – a 10% increase over enrollment last year, according to School Board Chair Matt Rowe.
That’s a testament to the excitement people feel over the new building, he said.
Rowe thanked City Council member Jason Graham, Ward 1 representative, for his help in getting the school situated in Idlewild Village.
“We’re proud that this treasured institution now calls Idlewild home,” he said, adding that the building and its athletic fields are for “the whole [Fredericksburg] community.”
Rowe also thanked community members of the Facebook group “Fund FXBG Schools” for consistently amplifying the need for a new building to meet the division’s capacity and programming needs.
Stephen Ventura, principal of Walker-Grant Middle School, thanked Council, the School Board, city and school division staff, and everyone else involved in bringing the new school to fruition–”on time and under budget,” as Catlett said–for their support.
“You didn’t just invest in a project, but a promise,” Ventura said, a promise of a future where “every student is known, supported, and challenged.”
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