Three weeks after moving from Long Island, N.Y., to Lovettsville, Va., in northern Loudon County, Jarred Silverman learned a painful lesson in his second-grade public school classroom.
"[Jarred] was humming a song, a Hebrew tune," recalls his mother, Deanna, 39. "And another little boy -- his first new friend and the son of the soccer coach -- said he wasn't allowed to sit with Jewish children. And that's how our school year began."
In the four and a half years since that incident, Silverman has worked to ensure that the rude awakening her son experienced would ultimately turn out to be an isolated event.
