Frances Slaughter · 2005 Honoree

One morning several years ago, kindergarten children at Peabody school arrived to find their teacher, “Miss Frances,” sitting in the “time out” seat. She explained to them that before coming to school she had had an argument with her father and that she had decided she really needed to apologize for the way she had spoken to him. So later that morning, on their way back to school from a visit to the library, the children stopped by the brick row house on Lexington Place where Frances Slaughter has lived for much of her life. She introduced each child to her dad and then, in front of them, she told him she was sorry.

Frances Slaughter, the director of the Capitol Hill Cooperative Nursery School at Watkins and a teacher who has been important to multitudes of our children, many of whom she remembers by name twenty years after having last seen them, thinks that teaching about how to get along with people is one of the most important parts of working with the very young.“They need to care about other people, they need to have some empathy,” she says. “And it’s important for them to know the community so they can be good citizens.” Taking walks in the neighborhood has been and is one of her favorite activities for the 20 children that she teaches each year at Watkins and for the scores that over the years she has taught at Peabody, Wee Care (now the Hill Preschool) and in private playgroups. She takes them to the Eastern Market for picnics, to admire the Pardoe windows at Christmastime and, when it’s warm, down to the merry go round on the Mall. She helps them make cards for grandparents, teaches them to tie their shoes and gives them plenty of time for unstructured play. “Some people don’t choose the nursery school because they see it as not strict enough,” she admits. “But I have the children on a routine they can count on and they learn to enjoy the world around them.”

Frances Slaughter grew up on Capitol Hill with seven sisters and brothers (“I was the baby of the older set and the oldest of the younger one”) and aunts, uncles and cousins close by. Her family knew everyone up and down the street and she remembers block parties from “before it was fashionable” and neighbors asking her mother to “send down one of the kids” when they needed help with chores. Frances went to local public schools - to Ann M Goding Elementary School, Stuart Junior High and St. Cecilia’s, the Catholic school for girls that was at the corner of Sixth and East Capitol Streets. Sundays, if she had done her chores and gone to church, she could walk up to Pennsylvania Avenue and choose between two movie houses there.

After high school. Frances went to college at Benedict in South Carolina. She returned to Washington and had jobs at the Smithsonian and the National Gallery before realizing “I need to be with children.” Since then she has worked with very young children, along the way taking advanced courses at UDC and moving to Lagos, Nigeria to work with one of the families she met through teaching. That was a wonderful experience but after a year she was ready to come home. “I needed to get back into the family thing,” she explains.

Frances is proud of her twenty-two year old son Brenden, the child of a niece who was unable to care for him herself; she calls her great-niece Brianna, “the light of my life.” Her father is now 93 and bedridden and lives with Frances in the house where she grew up on Lexington Place.