Welcome to the Summer Issue of Fusion

Dr. Lisa Thomas, Superintendent, Meridian CUSD #101

There's a photograph on the wall in this building. Actually, there are dozens of them — decades of graduation classes, row after row of faces looking forward. Rochelle Perkins, who has worked in our superintendent's office for nearly twenty years, knows most of them. Her mother's class is on that wall. Her mother's siblings. Her own graduating class, 1992. Her daughter's. And now her grandson walks these halls.

"Everybody who lives in this area has gone to this school," she said. "You could find your family tree on that wall."

That is the story of Meridian. Not just a school that serves a community, but a school that is a community — one where the roots go deep and the threads hold.

This summer issue of Fusion gathers those threads together. You'll find Alsandra Lewis, who graduated from Howard University in 1966, came home to Mounds, and taught French and English at Meridian for thirty-two years before retiring — and then not quite retiring. You'll find Bill Thurston, who carried mail for twelve years after leaving college, started law school in his mid-thirties, and became Chief Judge of the First Judicial Circuit of Illinois. You'll find Larry Houston, who didn't wait for a job to find him — he crossed a campus, found a superintendent, and asked the direct question that started everything.

And then there are the students in these pages. Ty'Reona Moore sat for her CNA certification exam the morning of her interview for this story. Christian Atkinson found his direction in a health class that was genuinely different from the ones before it. Chloe Hunt doesn't have a car yet to get to her clinicals, but she's not worried — she'll figure it out.

They will.

What connects every voice in this issue — the teacher who never left, the judge who took the long road, the alumni who came back, the current students already in motion — is a quiet, determined belief in the value of showing up. Joan B. Floyd counseled students from a van parked behind the school for years. Charlotte Mallory left a legacy in this district whether anyone was watching or not. Jennifer Nixon-Lanier was at the beach when we called — and she took the interview anyway.

Once a Bobcat, always a Bobcat.

This community is worth documenting, and these people are worth knowing. We are grateful to every voice in this issue, and to the village that has always raised them.