the Southern Education Board—energized Valentine and left her adamant that the Board should meet the following year in Richmond. Valentine wanted the 1903 meeting of the Southern Education Board to address the educational challenges faced by poor whites and African Americans—a topic she knew would draw ire from some of her fellow Southerners. She also knew they may be leery of any organization with Northern leadership. She held several citizen meetings where she, with the help of other education advocates, explained how the Southern Education Board could help Richmond. Her efforts proved successful. On April 22, 1903, the Southern Education Board met in Richmond in what was one of the first racially integrated meetings in the city since the Civil War. A Richmond Times-Dispatch article from April 25, 1903 stated: "A notable fact about the audience last night was that for the first time, so far as known, in the post-bellum history of Richmond, whites and blacks sat side by side in the same public hall, with no line of demarkation [sic]." Cooperative Education Association Valentine's work with the REA and the Southern Education Board helped make educational reform a more popular issue across the state of Virginia. In March 1904, less than a year after Richmond hosted the Southern Education Board conference, she was commissioned along with Governor Andrew J. Montague and Joseph W. Southall, superintendent of public instruction, to establish a permanent committee dedicated to raising the standards of private and public education and advocating for the cause of universal education across the state. They named the committee the Cooperative Education Association of Virginia. Valentine was the only woman selected to serve on this executive committee. Continuing her education advocacy After her appointment to the Cooperative Education Association of Virginia, Valentine sought to bring even more attention to the education challenges Virginia was facing, speaking to any civic organization that would have her. In her speeches she called for public investment in improved educational facilities, playgrounds, and vocational training for Virginia's children. In a 1904 speech to the REA Valentine said: "Let each one of us...make it our business to convince our neighbors that it pays to educate the children of every class...that Richmond can never be the great and beautiful city we all wish her to be until her schools are so equipped as to train her boys and girls to be efficient, productive, law-abiding, beauty-loving citizens