“What could be more American than what happened in this place?” President Obama asked that question in Selma, Alabama, yesterday, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the civil-rights marches there. This past week, teachers and students from Chief Sealth International High School augmented their studies of those events with donation-funded moviegoing trips. Social-studies teacher Matthew Baudhuin shared a photo of one group of students at the theater, with this report:

My colleague at Chief Sealth, Dr. De La Ossa, and I wanted to share with the WSB an awesome opportunity Google provided for 150 of our students last week. Through the Donors Choose program, Chief Sealth applied for and received a generous donation from Google to take students to see the film “Selma.” We took 150 US history students on Wednesday and Thursday downtown to the Regal Meridian.

This was an incredible opportunity for our students, especially just days before the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday March in Selma in 1965. The students were inspired and moved — engaging in a serious discussion about the 1965 Voting Rights Act that resulted from this protest.

(Side note: We’ve mentioned Donors Choose before – it’s also open to donations from individuals, and used frequently by teachers all over the country to seek funding for relatively small projects like this – you can search by school, type of project, and/or other criteria here.)