CHARLOTTE -- For the past year and a half, Dorothy Counts-Scoggins worked to make a difference within Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, just like she did more than 50 years ago.
In 1957, at just 15 years old, she was the first black student at Harding University High School, and breaking those color barriers came with a cost. She was harassed, students called her names, threw rocks and spit at her.
Now, she wants to make sure no child experiences what she went through.
"Working with a group across the city, in terms of what are we going to do about Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools because I have seen it in change in the last 10 years, but now I've seen it more and more like it was for me, when I went to school in 1957," she said.
She says even though the city has grown tremendously since then, there's still a major racial divide.
"How did we get to that point? At one time, Charlotte was a world-class city in many ways, and some ways it still is. But when it comes to the racial part of it, you know, that part is, I see a lot of that going back to way it was when I was a child growing up in the city."
So, that's why Counts-Scoggins spends her days mentoring young, black girls at schools in the district like Harding. She says her main focus is on Project L.I.F.T. schools.
"We have isolated schools, we have pockets of schools that are predominately children of color, but not only are they children of color, but they're children of poverty."
She says the group she's working with often attends CMS meetings to voice their concerns about lack of diversity in the district, hoping to see a change sooner than later.
"I'm a person who's always in the background, being an advocate for those that I feel that are less fortunate or don't have an advocate."