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We’ll know him as Mo. He wants it that way.

He became Guilford County’s new superintendent Monday. He’ll oversee the education of 72,000 students, be the boss for 10,000 employees and sit in the hottest hot seat in our county — a position fraught with political peril and emotional heartache.

But a few minutes after sunrise Monday, wearing a sharp suit, he said thank you — five times — in front of a small crowd of educators and school officials.

Then, with TV cameras and a crowd in tow, he visited four schools.

Maurice Green. Definitely something different for Guilford County.

For the next three months, he’ll carry out what he calls his Listen and Learn Tour. He’ll visit schools, write on his new blog and start conversations countywide to find out what works and what doesn’t.

One of those conversations started Monday at Dudley High, in front of nearly two dozen teachers.

Mo talked about “we.” That got the attention of Donald Caudle Sr.

“What is your idea of we?” asked Caudle, a business education teacher at Dudley.

“My idea of 'we’ is getting every voice at the table,” he told Caudle. “We’ll have teacher advisory committees, parent advisory committees, student advisory communities. I’ll be out in the schools. I want you to stop me and say, 'Mo, here’s what’s going on.’

“That is how we get 'we,’” he said. “Now, I’m asking you to run harder than you ever have in your life. Why? Our kids need it.”

“You hit the nail on the head,” Caudle told Mo. “You couldn’t have hit it any better.”

There’s no doubt Mo’s different from Guilford’s two previous superintendents, Jerry Weast and Terry Grier. The two Ed.D.’s had a management style that left parents angry, teachers scared and various corners of our community disillusioned.

But school board members say Mo is a bridge-builder, and Monday, teachers and parents said they sense that. He’s quiet, even a bit stiff.

But there’s no doubt about his passion for education.

It’s because of Gwendolyn, his mother.

She grew up poor in the Virgin Islands, raised her two sons — Mo and her older son, Reggie — by herself after the death of her husband, Walter.

He died in a house fire. Mo was 10. Afterward, in Macon, Ga., she put herself through college by working various jobs. That included bussing tables and serving food at a cafeteria.

She always wanted to be a teacher. In the Virgin Islands, she even play-acted as a teacher, using rocks as students. She finally reached her dream — graduating from college the same time Mo graduated from high school.

She became a teacher, and she often told her two sons: “If you get an education, the sky is the limit.”

Today, Reggie teaches math at a college in Georgia. And Mo — his mother is the only one who calls him Maurice — runs the third-largest school system in the state.

Mo comes into Guilford County as a 41-year-old father of two, a Duke grad, with much to prove.

There will be folks who will criticize his lack of experience in the classroom; he never taught a class.

And there will be folks who will fume about his yearly salary of $250,000. He’s a freshman superintendent from Charlotte who started his meteoric rise in public school administration just seven years ago.

And after the tumultuous terms of the past two superintendents, you wonder what this quiet man from Georgia will bring to this hot-seat job.

But watch him work.

Like when a parent from High Point’s Ferndale Middle School stopped him Monday by the office about her concerns. Mo gave her his business card, saying, “Don’t feel like you have to chase me down and find me.”

Or when an eighth-grader at Ferndale, her boyfriend’s name written in ink across her left hand, peered up from the North Carolina map on her desk and talked to the sharp-dressed man kneeling beside her.

“Do you know who I am?” Mo asked.

“The principal said somebody famous was coming,” she replied.

“No, I’m not famous,” he told her. “I’m the new superintendent.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com.