Mildred Wright recounts her career as an educator and administrator working with open plan schools in North Carolina, particularly her experiences helping to open, teach at, and manage Irwin Avenue Open School, the second functioning open plan school in North Carolina. Ms. Wright discusses how she became involved in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System's early experiments with open education and the people and ideas that influenced the development of open schools in Charlotte. She describes her own training as a teacher and experiences as a school principal, and then considers how education in Charlotte has changed since the 1970s, especially in the area of mainstreaming bilingual and emotionally challenged children into the general school population.