Simms was born on a Virginia farm in 1855. Emancipation came when she was nine. Like many freed people in the Reconstruction-era South, she pursued education with intensity - first as a student, then as a teacher. She attended Hampton Institute, the historically Black college in Tidewater Virginia that trained Black teachers for the rural South in the late 19th century, and returned to Harrisonburg to teach in 1877. She would teach there until 1933, the year before she died. Three generations of Black families in Harrisonburg passed through her classroom. She did the work in a state and a city that did not pay her well, did not protect her right to vote until very late, and did not formally acknowledge her contribution for decades.

The Effinger Street school, which Simms helped establish on the former Hilltop estate of the Gray family, served Harrisonburg's Black children from around 1880. By the 1930s the building was outgrown. In 1938 and 1939 - four years after Simms's death - the city built a new larger brick school on the same hilltop and named it the Lucy F. Simms School. The building was Art Deco in style, like the Booker T. Washington school in Staunton that opened two years earlier. Both schools were co-educational and both served only Black students, products of the segregated Virginia public school system. For 28 years, the Simms school was the heart of Black Harrisonburg's educational and civic life - graduations, assemblies, community gatherings happened here.

Harrisonburg public schools desegregated in the 1960s under federal pressure. The Lucy F. Simms School closed in 1966 as Black students moved to formerly white schools. The building sat empty for decades. Like many former segregation-era schools, it carried meaning the city did not always know what to do with. Demolition was discussed; preservation was advocated; nothing happened. In 2004 the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, which formally protected it. In 2005 it reopened as the Lucy F. Simms Continuing Education Center, offering adult education classes, GED programs, English language instruction for immigrants, and community programming. The building, which had been a school for Black children, became a school for adult learners of every background.

In recent years, James Madison University and local researchers have worked to recover more of Simms's life and teaching philosophy. An oral history project at JMU has gathered the memories of former students - now elderly - who recall her insistence on standards, her demanding warmth, her habit of buying shoes for children who came to school barefoot. A 2020 book by local publisher Lot's Wife titled Lucy Frances Simms: From Slavery to Revered Public Service brought her story into wider view. The school on the hilltop has been adapted for modern use, but the bricks are the ones laid in 1938 and the name on the door has not changed. Visitors learning to read English in the building today are participating in a tradition Simms started - and her family, who experienced slavery and segregation directly, would recognize the through-line.