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Born August 31, 1936, in Monroeville, AL
Died June 24, 2015, in Beaufort County, SC
In 1975, Marva Collins founded Westside Preparatory School to educate Chicago’s youth. Using pension funds from 14 years of teaching in public schools, she built a schoolroom in her home. It successfully grew to include many buildings on two separate campuses with the help of proceeds from the 1981 television movie The Marva Collins Story. Collins declined the position of U.S. Secretary of Education to continue teaching. In 1989 she received the AAUW Achievement Award for her dedication to reforming Chicago’s school system, and in 2004 the National Endowment for the Humanities named her a National Humanities Medalist.