When fifth grader Cache McLelland says his teacher makes math easier, he doesn’t mean that the numbers suddenly add themselves. What he means is that she finds ways to make understanding feel possible. “She makes it different ways,” he says, explaining how bar models help him see decimals as something real, not just lines on a page. It’s a small moment of clarity in a bright classroom in Joppa, Illinois—but as teacher Jesse Dummitt listens to her student find words for what’s happening, it’s also a quiet reflection of what Joppa-Maple Grove Schools do so well: they meet children where they are and help them see what they can do next.

Dummitt smiles as he talks about the work. “This is my third year teaching,” she says, “but I started here as a one-on-one aide. I loved it so much I went back to school.” Her path to the classroom wasn’t straight. She grew up nearby, graduated from Joppa in 2010, earned a CNA license at sixteen, and briefly thought she’d follow her family’s footsteps into nursing. “I went to work one day in a nursing home and realized—this isn’t for me,” she laughs. “I feel emotions so deeply. I’m an empath, and I knew I needed to be somewhere I could channel that in a different way.”

That empathy found its place here. After a few years abroad with her husband, who served in the Army, Jesse came home to Joppa. Their son Eli—now one of her fifth graders—was just starting pre-K, and it was the teachers who first helped him find his voice. “He didn’t talk until he was three,” she recalls, “and when we came here, I finally felt like people were fighting for him, helping him get the services he needed. It felt like someone was finally listening.” That feeling—that someone was listening—anchored her decision to return. She got her degree through Grand Canyon University, joined the staff, and found herself back in the same halls that once shaped her.

There’s an easy rhythm between Jesse and her students. She doesn’t stand above them so much as beside them, teaching with humor, patience, and the kind of candor that fifth graders crave. “I make it my mission,” she says, “to take whatever cool lingo they have and make it the cringiest thing they’ve ever heard.” It works. The laughter becomes its own language, a bridge between teacher and student. And when the laughter settles, what remains is connection—the kind that makes learning stick.

It’s that connection that seems to define this small district. Ask Cache what makes his school special, and his answers are simple but telling. “You treat people how you want to be treated,” he says. “Don’t hurt their feelings.” He’s not reciting a rule—he’s articulating a culture. The district’s slogan, Grit, Growth, and Grace, lives in these exchanges, in the way students talk about kindness as if it’s part of the curriculum. Grace, here, is not a word on a wall. It’s a practiced habit of care.

For Jesse, that sense of community runs deep. She and her husband live just a block from the school. “We’re hometown people,” she says. “I grew up just down the road in Grand Chain and moved here around my sophomore year. Even then, you could feel it—the togetherness. You’re protected here.” That feeling of belonging has only grown stronger with time. The same families she sees in the hallways fill the pews of her church, show up on her porch with casseroles when life gets complicated, and celebrate one another’s milestones as if they were their own.

Jesse’s compassion reaches beyond the classroom, too. She has twice served as a surrogate mother, carrying children for families who could not. “It’s been amazing,” she says, describing how neighbors left food and notes of support even though she wasn’t the one with a newborn. “There’s just that want and need here to take care of people.” Her story could be the headline of any Joppa-Maple Grove publication—one person’s quiet selflessness multiplied by an entire community’s instinct to lift others up.

Perhaps that’s why coming home made so much sense. Some people spend years chasing the next place, but Jesse found what she needed in the same small town she once couldn’t wait to leave. “The teachers here care. The kids are thick as thieves. They’ve been together since pre-K, and when a new student comes in, they just fold them in like family,” she says. “It’s everywhere—in every hallway, every grade level. You can feel it.”

You can also see it—in a teacher who traded scrubs for a classroom, in a student who now believes math makes sense, in a school that still feels like the heart of its town. If you look closely enough, you might even see the ripples—those quiet, widening rings that spread from a single act of care, one lesson at a time.