Hope Pearcy grew up in Massac County knowing about Joppa-Maple Grove the way you know about a place that's close by and quietly well-regarded. When she finished at Murray State University and started looking for her first classroom, the choice wasn't hard.

"Joppa was at the top of my list," she says.

This is her first full year — first real classroom, first set of students who are entirely hers. Twenty-six or twenty-seven years from now, some of them will still be able to tell you what they learned in her room. That's second grade.

She knew she wanted to teach it long before she had a degree. Her nieces were five and six when she started working through school concepts with them — the same ages as her students now. She remembers watching something click.

"Once they got it," she says, "it was stuck with them forever."

That moment — the aha, the shift, the look on a child's face when something that was out of reach suddenly isn't — is what pulled her into this work and kept her there, even when the profession itself was giving a lot of people reasons to reconsider.

"Teaching had a lot more intrinsic value because of the outcomes it had for other people," she says. "Being a stepping stone to a brighter future for them was what made me not doubt my decisions."

Her classroom of sixteen students is one of the larger ones in the elementary building. They'll move through every grade here together — same hallways, same faces, same community — and they already treat each other accordingly.

"It's more of a family than you think of a school," Hope says.

She believes that what happens in second grade sets the trajectory. Reading isn't just a subject — it's the mechanism everything else runs on.

"If you teach them to read," she says, "you teach them to succeed."

For a teacher named Hope, it's hard not to notice how well that fits.

Down the hall, Sherri Pearcy has been making a similar argument for six years — just with cardboard, paint, and a well-placed question instead of words on a page.

The art teacher for kindergarten through sixth grade, she came to teaching after raising four children and spending years at home. She had always loved art, studied interior design, let it simmer — and then stepped into a classroom that turned out to suit her exactly.

Her four kids, for what it's worth, all went into engineering. None of them is an artist.

Sherri's classroom runs on an idea she lays out on the first day of every school year, to every new student who walks in uncertain.

"You cannot make a mistake in art," she tells them. "All it is is redirecting it. But it's not a mistake."

The morning of her interview, her students were building sculptures from paper towel rolls — cutting them, assembling vertical towers, planning horizontal designs, and setting out to paint the whole thing the next day. Some cut sideways instead of straight and ended up with something shorter than expected. She let it happen.

"I let them fail quite a bit," she says. "And a lot of times when they fail is when they figure out, hey — this is even cooler than I thought it was going to be."

Failure as direction. Mistake as discovery. It's the same philosophy that recently backfired on her, gloriously: she assigned sixth graders art history reports on Egypt, Rome, and Greece as something close to a punishment. They loved it. Some made artifacts to use in their presentations.

"Yeah," she says with a laugh. "That punishment backfired."

What Sherri gives students — permission to try without fear of getting it wrong — doesn't stay in the art room. It travels. Into other subjects, other challenges, other moments when a kid has to decide whether to attempt something hard or hold back.

"I just really like it here," she says simply, near the end. "It is like family. The staff support each other. And we encourage our students."

Two classrooms. Two teachers. One at the beginning of her career, one well into hers. One working with words, one working with whatever today's materials happen to be.

Superintendent Greg Goins amplified on how it all came together so neatly, "We hired Hope first and our interview committee was so thrilled to have someone fresh out of college that was eager to start her career here in Joppa. Then we had a late opening right before school started and were able to hire Sherri as our Art Teacher so we felt like we won the lottery by getting them both to start the school year. It's just a joy to watch daughter and mother work together and lean on each other. They have both fit in perfectly with our school and community goals."

Both are rooted in the same belief: that every child in this building is capable of more than they arrived thinking.

And that it's someone's job — a glad job, a chosen job — to help them find out.