Sarah Wooten '00

Sarah Wooten ’00 jumped at the opportunity to tour Spain with Upper School Spanish teacher Mrs. Carmen Lonero in her seventh grade year at Pike. With a zest for travel and boundless intellectual curiosity, she embarked on what would be the first of many trips abroad. That Pike trip led to future school trips and the study of immigration law, and ultimately, shaped her desire to build meaningful relationships with the people she meets each day. While Wooten’s journey may seem circuitous, she landed her dream job and now it all makes sense. Today, she is almost back to where she started.

Wooten is a “lifer,” meaning she began Pike in Pre-Kindergarten and stayed through eighth grade. In her ten years at Pike, she took advantage of the experience that included healthy risk-taking, thought provoking projects and a caring faculty.

“At Pike, I had the chance to see what I was good at and take it as far as I could go with it,” she said.
She remembers the eighth grade journal project where students become a character of the Civil War era. After researching an aspect of the time, students wrote about events from a particular point of view. The key to the assignment was to make the journal as authentic as possible.

“Mine was awesome and I took it way too far,” said Wooten. “I tried to make my journal look old and literally threw it in the mud. When it dried, it became really dusty. No one else was doing that at the time.” She attributes her early academic success to Pike’s nurturing environment where students are encouraged to explore learning in different ways.

After Pike, Wooten continued to foster her love of travel and the Spanish language while building relationships with faculty and students alike who shared common interests. She headed to Milton Academy as a boarder.

“I was one of only a few students who went away to boarding school,” said Wooten. “I totally fell in love with the faculty there. At times, they pushed me to try new things and at other times they caught me when I fell.” When another chance to travel presented itself, she took it. A revered Spanish teacher took students on an impromptu trip to Costa Rica that reinforced Wooten’s love of different cultures.

When applying to colleges, she was accepted at many esteemed institutions, including University of Virginia and Barnard, but ultimately chose Spelman College, a historically all black women’s college, where she majored in Spanish Language and Literature. In the fall of her junior year, she went to Granada in the south of Spain where issues of immigration echo much of what is happening at the southern borders of the United States today.

“People are making the very dangerous trip from North Africa to Spain and entering Spain through the city of Granada,” she said. “I studied the policies and laws there and compared them to the U.S. laws.” She returned from her travels with a sense of duty to help others.