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GREENSBORO — Mary Hopkins promised them a ceremony. And she kept her word.

She spent $400 of her own money, booked the auditorium at the Greensboro Historical Museum and lassoed a school board member, even the mayor, to help herald the accomplishments of her students at Jesse Wharton Elementary.

Thirty-two of her 39 fifth-graders came. They came to get a certificate — and a gold-plated medal — for their outstanding work in AL, school slang for Advanced Learner.

They came to see Hopkins, too. They hugged her, took pictures with her and listened to her one more time.

With every student, it was the same. She placed her hands on their shoulders, peered over her black-frame glasses, and repeated the mantra she said often in class.

“When they say hope,’’ she told them, “You say I know.’’

They do know. They know Hopkins isn’t coming back.

She lost her job as Jesse Wharton’s AL teacher. She came in during the 2008-2009 school year as an interim employee, a teacher hired on a year-to-year contract, an educational free agent.

In this painful budget year, worse than what anyone can ever remember, those free agents got hit the hardest.

Let’s run the numbers. Guilford County Schools had 756 interim employees. Principals recommended the school system rehire 578. Only 499 made the cut.

That means 257 interim employees, those educational free agents, don’t have jobs today with Guilford County Schools.
Hopkins is one of those people. She’s an educator with 32 years of experience in the classroom, a woman who has taught in four states. She’s become a statistic.

Jesse Wharton does have a new AL teacher, no doubt someone with a smaller paycheck. You hear it’s a bottom-line thing. The money just ain’t there.

Consider this: 85 percent of the school system’s budget is personnel. Teachers, guidance counselors, that sort of thing. The school system can’t raise its own funds. So, it has to depend on local, state and federal funds.

Well, we all know what happened to that money.

Explain that to Hopkins’ students. They don’t understand. They just know that Hopkins helped them learn words like “benevolent’’ and “blatant’’ and taught them how to be positive, respect life and work hard.

Or in the words of one fifth-grader, Hopkins “made your mind wide.’’

So, they came two weeks ago. On one of the last days of their carefree summer, they came with their parents to an auditorium in downtown Greensboro to get a certificate from the President’s Education Awards Program.

The certificate bears the stock signature of President Barack Obama. They received a three-paragraph letter from the U.S. Department of Education that talks about commitment, underneath a heading that says “The White House.’’

And 15 students got another certificate for competing in the WordMasters Challenge, a national language arts competition. They placed third in the nation against 729 other schools.

One fifth-grader, Bailey Kargo, got that and a gold-plated medal, the size of a silver dollar. Bailey was one of only 10 fifth-graders nationwide to earn a perfect score in all three of the WordMasters’ meets. She beat out more 38,505 students.

Today, Bailey keeps her medal in a bedroom drawer, and she’s hung her two certificates on her bedroom wall, beside her dresser, so she can see them every morning when she brushes her hair and gets ready for school.

It’s her reminder about the importance of hard work. She knows she’ll need it. She wants to become an architect or a zoologist.

But it’s also her reminder of Hopkins, her AL teacher. Ask her about that, and Bailey is not at a loss for words.

“She has changed my life,’’ says Bailey, now a sixth-grader at Mendenhall Middle School. “She has made me feel like I can accomplish anything.’’

You can’t put a price on that.

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