What Maya Angelou Taught Our Students

I was afraid to pick up the phone and call Maya Angelou. It was 1997, and my friend David Domenici and I had just started a school in Washington, D.C. for kids who had been arrested. The school was less than a year old, but one thing was already clear: We needed a new name, a real name. We had been calling ourselves the See Forever School, and while the phrase had some resonance (we told kids that they were learning to see beyond tomorrow, to “see forever”), our students didn’t love it.