She desegregated Fayette schools amid retaliation. UK teacher scholarship honors her.

Lexington resident Helen Caise Wade saw retaliation and loneliness as the first Black student to integrate Fayette County schools when she went to Lafayette High School for summer school in 1955.

But Wade persisted in getting an education and went on to become a school teacher for more than four decades.

With a goal of putting more students of color on the path to being teachers in Fayette County Public Schools and Kentucky, Lafayette teacher Christopher McCurry on Monday launched a fundraising effort for an endowed scholarship at the University of Kentucky called “Future Teachers of Kentucky Honoring Helen Caise Wade.”

“We strongly believe this will benefit all students, not just students of color,” said McCurry. Nationally, 80 percent of public school teachers and eighty-five percent of private school teachers are white, he said.

McCurry, Kentucky’s 2021 High School Teacher of the Year, said he and his colleague, Joe Gross, started a group called Teachers for Equitable Kentucky schools last year to create change in schools across Kentucky.

Part of their work has been to start an equity committee at Lafayette and work with the Wade family to raise $50,000 for the scholarship.

“I was just knocked off my feet,” Wade said Tuesday of her reaction to the scholarship.

When Wade integrated Fayette schools she was a sophomore at the then all-Black Douglass High School and she wanted to go to the all-white Lafayette to take a history class. The principal at Douglass worked with the superintendent of public schools to make it happen, and the board of education approved her enrollment.

“I was a young girl...who was kind of feisty,” she said.

Wade said a white student named Barbara Levy welcomed her as did a white teacher named Mr. Tucker. But otherwise, “if you’ve ever known what loneliness is, I had that feeling.”

She said her family was nearly ruined financially because of retaliation. Her father, John Caise, had a successful construction business until that summer, but when white customers saw her name in newspaper articles identifying her as the student who was integrating schools in Lexington, “we kept getting calls from people he had jobs with, everyone of them took the jobs away from him.”

John Caise found work north of Lexington in Erlanger where no one knew that his daughter had been the first to integrate schools in the Lexington area. Wade said she offered to quit summer school because it had affected her family’s income, but her father told her, “We are a family who never gives up for something they dearly believe in.”

“I think you believe in what you are doing,” he said.

After completing the summer program, Wade returned to the all Black Douglass High as a junior. After graduation, she attended the University of Kentucky, but said, “I met a lot of prejudice there” and transferred to Kentucky State University, a predominantly Black college in Frankfort.

Despite her early discomfort at the University of Kentucky, she said it was through UK that she got an interview that landed her a teaching job in Cleveland, Ohio. Wade taught there 45 years before moving back to Lexington a few years ago.

Wade said she would readily encourage students of color to go into teaching.

“It gave me a good life,” she said.

There is a shortage of Black educators, especially males, said Wade.

McCurry said he and others working on the effort plan to have a GoFundMe fundraiser for the scholarship in effect until the end of the school year. At least $1,817 had been raised through Go Fund Me by Tuesday afternoon.

“Whatever money we raise will go to opening the fund at the University of Kentucky, where we will spend the next five years working to fully fund the scholarship,” he said.

A banner dedicated to Wade hangs on the wall at Lafayette. Wade and her stepdaughter, an attorney, went to see the banner recently and her stepdaughter was one of the first to donate to the scholarship.

McCurry said the scholarship in Wade’s name will help assure that diversity in teaching staffs reflects the diversity of students.

Aimeé Baston, UK College of Education Director of Philanthropy, said what the Teachers for Equitable Kentucky Schools are doing to help attract students of color into the teaching profession “is so needed and important.”

“To fundraise for a scholarship named for Helen Caise Wade makes this project even more meaningful,” Baston said.” Scholarships make a difference in the UK College of Education’s ability to attract students of color into teaching careers. The diversity of teachers in Kentucky needs to match the diversity of the state, and this scholarship will help our efforts to achieve that.”

This story was originally published May 5, 2021 at 10:20 AM.