Oh, we never studied poetry in school until I was a junior (a very little bit for American Lit, I remember reading a bit of Whitman, etc.) and senior (Brit Lit, Beowulf through... we did a few 20th C short stories, but I think we only did poetry up to 1900) but every year in elementary school (and possibly the first two years of high school? I forget) we'd have a reader, and the reader had poetry in it, and I'd read the entire thing in the first few weeks of school, including the poetry.

Yeah, we had sort of this nod to Black History Month in elementary school to, well, counteract the rest of the year. I should ask my best friend whether her school district did it too -- I always figured it was a US South kind of thing, but could be just my school district.