Officials at George Washington’s former home saw a crisis: Washington, the United States’ first president, was on the road to extinction from schools.

So those at Mount Vernon, near Alexandria, Va., raised $450,000 and put portraits of Washington, along with lesson plans, into 3,000 schools within the past year.

One local school, St. Francis Xavier School in St. Joseph, has made that list. During the school’s trip to Washington, D.C., last month, seventh- and eighth-graders and school staff visited Mount Vernon, where they saw the Washington portrait print and materials they’ll soon receive by mail.

Ann Bay, Mount Vernon’s director of education, stressed the importance of getting the first president back in the classroom.

“If people don’t know the story of George Washington and the other Founders, they can never really appreciate what our democracy is all about,” Ms. Bay said. “We want him to have a presence in every school across the country.”

Prior to this effort, a minority of schools had portraits of Washington, she said, and he was being mentioned less and less in lessons — a huge change from centuries and decades back.

Ms. Bay points to a few reasons for the decline.

President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind mandate requires that schools focus on reading and math student performance.

“Subjects like history are being neglected,” she said.

Also, there’s more of a focus on recent history, and as time goes on, there’s obviously more history to cover, she said.

“There was a time when teaching about the Founders as ‘dead white men,’ really went out of fashion,” she said.

St. Francis Xavier teacher Kevin Koenig organized the trip and has watched Washington fade from the classroom.

Growing up, the 57-year-old celebrated two presidents’ holidays in February — one for George Washington and one for Abraham Lincoln.

Those two holidays have become one — President’s Day. As a result, there’s less emphasis on Washington, he said.

There are more events to cover in class these days, he said, which has led to the downsizing of Washington lessons.

The Mount Vernon program can help turn that around.

“It’s nice to put a brighter light on his legacy,” he said.

Nancy Hull can be reached

at nancyhull@npgco.com.