EXCLUSIVE: Plans in place to turn former enslavement site in MD into place of empowerment

BOWIE, Md. (7News) — Reporter's Notebook: The pandemic’s impact on how we teach and how children learn has been among the great challenges of the COVID-age. But there’s a small school in the DMV that’s succeeding by prioritizing student wellness, not a child’s ability to memorize multiplication tables. It’s called Chance Academy. And it’s founder, while searching for a new, larger home for the school, made a remarkable discovery that she hopes will positively impact the lives of countless children and their families.

The chance to thrive. It’s all we really want, especially for our children.

Gloria Williams, the long-time greeter at this small school housed in a DC church, knows full well the secret to winning each day in this unique educational environment. Begin with kindness.

“When they come in and see you and you make them feel important, make them feel worthwhile. Make them feel that they’re somebody," says Williams.

It’s called Chance Academy. Founder and Executive Director Anna Bernanke opened several years ago with only two students. She now has dozens with plans to grow.

“They need to know that you care about them and that you believe in their potential," says Bernanke.

Bernanke believes young minds shine in a space where they, their families, and their teachers like DeLeon War are first and foremost supported and celebrated.

Ware says, “The biggest thing that I think anyone can take from this whole thing is that it can be done.”

“The child first, loving the child, support the child and then challenging them academically," adds Bernanke.

Here tolerance and empathy are foundational and while mastery of content critical so is creativity and flexibility.

“It just opened my mind to so many different things," says former Chance Academy student Samia Robinson.

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Robinson couldn’t wait to enroll her 5-year-old Leilani.

“It’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be really great and I’m so excited for her," says Robinson.

Bernanke accepts all kinds of students, but the majority are highly motivated black and brown children from challenging backgrounds.

Siblings Cindy and Josue Escobar are flourishing after coming here not knowing English.

Josue sayd, “It’s literally like the teacher teaching you by yourself.”

“It’s not radical to think that every child needs to be loved. It’s not radical to think that every child has a talent, a gift that is precious," says Bernanke.

Anna Bernanke’s drive to re-imagine education stems from a childhood touched by the horrors of genocide.

“My parents were Holocaust survivors," adds Bernanke.

Anna says when her parents Lenka and Otto were newlyweds the Nazis swept through their town in the former Yugoslavia. They wiped out her father’s entire, immediate family. Otto and Lenka literally ran for their lives into the mountains.

Bernanke says, “I’m here because people sacrificed their lives to save my parents.”

Members of an underground network guided her young parents over the Alps into Italy, where Anna and her brother were born. They eventually emigrated to the US where their parents drilled into their DNA that the finest of educations would be their only salvation.

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Bernanke recalls, “When we moved to the US we had nothing. My mother would say to me, ‘The only thing you have to do is study. We will make sure that you are fed and clothed but just study’.”

Anna married a man named Ben; an economist who went on to chair the Federal Reserve. She followed her passion of teaching but soon found that cultivating wisdom from a child with means wasn’t nearly as rewarding as creating equity in education for someone who was just as smart but didn’t have as much.

“I always grew up with this very keen sense of supporting the underdog," says Bernanke.

To realize her dream of building an even playing field for the underdog, Anna Bernanke stunned even her biggest fans.

“Maybe what we need is a place with more land," says Bernanke.

Bernanke didn’t buy just any 10-acre lot in Bowie, Maryland for Chance Academy’s new home. She knowingly purchased land symbolic of oppression and inequality.

Historian Susan Pearl tells 7News On Your Side, “We’re actually on the tract, original tract from the 17th century that was known as Darnall’s Grove.”

Pearl says for more than a century the enslaved tilled this land.

“The grew a lot of crops. They also had a lot of horses," adds Pearl.

Tobacco, soybeans, butter, and hay the products of bondage. This circa 1800 plantation-style home known as Fairview belonging to the man named after this very city.

“We are at the front of the home of Oden Bowie who was the 34th Governor of Maryland," says Bernanke.

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Pearl’s research tells us that at the Civil War’s end 104 slaves were here, including Basil Wood and his wife Lizzy. 7News On Your Side confirming that descendants of Basil and Lizzy Wood still live in Prince George’s County.

Bernanke adds, “I think we were somehow meant to find this place.”

It’s not lost on Bernanke that the children who once roamed these fields in servitude were deprived of a proper education.

“We’re going to complete a circle," concludes Bernanke.

Anna Bernanke hopes to fill in that circle by 2024 with a campus of buildings nestled not far from Fairview’s shadow, transforming a place of inhumanity into one of empowerment. For Leilani Robinson and her classmates, the chance to realize that opportunity isn’t a destination, but often the direction you’re already heading.

For more information on Chance Academy and how you can support their endeavors click here.

For more Black History Month stories, click here.