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GREENSBORO — You can bet they’ll think of Barack Obama today at Gillespie Park Elementary.

If snow doesn’t cancel school, they’ll watch his inauguration. And you can guarantee they’ll spot their principal, Gail Brady, hear her familiar greeting and see their hallway turn into a pep rally, right there, on the spot.

“Say what I say!” Brady shouts.

“I can do it!” her students shout back.

At first, you wonder if these kids at Gillespie Park believe it. They come from the side of Greensboro where dreams often feel deferred, let alone attainable, along this boulevard named after America’s foremost freedom fighter: Martin Luther King Jr.

Nearly every kid at Gillespie Park can’t afford lunch. Their parents live paycheck to paycheck. And they’ve told their teachers about their world along MLK that seems far from innocent.

Plus, when you study civil rights history, you’ll find out Gillespie Park Elementary was North Carolina’s first integrated school. Yet today, Gillespie Park — a school of 280 students in east Greensboro — is nearly all black.

Three years ago, when she came to Gillespie Park as its principal, Brady found a school where dreams felt faded and a family’s priorities centered more on survival than the need to get an education.

Today, that all seems different. You spot a big bulletin board with a picture of Obama and a five-word phrase — You Can Do It, Too! — that you can read from halfway down the hall.

Or you talk to teachers who’ve incorporated Obama’s election and today’s inauguration into their lesson plans, and they say their students have turned into poets and writers, performers and thinkers.

Or you sit through Friday’s “I Can Be: A Celebration of Dreams and Accomplishments” and see King’s life portrayed in a play written by two fifth-graders or a performance created by Gillespie Park’s new step team.

Or just watch the video on Brady’s BlackBerry. The screen is no bigger than the palm of an adult’s hand. Still, you can make it out: the parade of students, coming into her office last week, all dressed in costumes.

They were practicing for last Friday’s ceremony. They came in dressed as a doctor, a police officer, a teacher, a firefighter, and of course, a president.

“I love it,” says Brady, replaying the short video again on her BlackBerry. “They associate it with Obama’s election. They believe it.”

And they do.

Says Brittani Sumlin, a fifth-grader: “People may think, 'Oh, you’re not that smart’ or you can’t do anything because of the color of your skin or your past, but we can tell them that we can. Barack Obama is proof.”

Says Amir Brown, a fourth-grader: “It’s like my brother said I couldn’t do back flips. But I worked at it. I believed in myself, and a lot of other people did, too.”

Says Jaelyn Goldston, a second-grader: “It doesn’t matter how you look, it just matters that you do good.’’

Jaelyn and the rest of her classmates wrote “15 Uses For A President.” They saw Obama as a world cleaner, a job hunter, a peacemaker, a father, a friend.

And from that, says their teacher Ashley Murchison, they learned much about themselves and life beyond MLK.

“Some of them realize that the life they’re living is not how it has to be,” Murchison says, “and this (book about Obama) helps them want to do better because they realize that they can do anything if they want to.”

This week, if you walk into Gillespie Park, you’ll see Sue Kimmel’s handiwork in the front hallway. It’s dozens of cut-out construction-paper hands, all different colors, that detail the dreams of this new generation growing up alongside MLK.

Read them, this rainbow of cut-out hands, and you’ll get some idea about the impact of today’s inauguration — and beyond.

I can be a singer.

I can be a doctor.

I can be a big man.

I can be president.

I want to be good.

“There’s something magical about Martin Luther King’s birthday and the inauguration being so close together,” says Kimmel, the school’s media specialist.

“We’re not dreaming anymore. Does that make sense?’’

Yes. It does.

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