Dear Martinsville Community,

Every summer, I find myself thinking about the hallways of our schools, not the building itself,  but what moves through it. The questions kids carry. The possibilities they're beginning to sense, even if they can't yet name them.

This issue of TrueBlue is our attempt to answer those questions with the best evidence we have: the lives of the people who walked out those doors over the years.

Eleven of them are on the pages that follow. A Vietnam veteran who discovered a calling for ministry in his forties, despite failing speech class in high school. A physician who uses social media to deliver accurate medical information to the young patients who need it most. A Marine who shipped to boot camp at 18 and is enrolling in college this fall with a quiet kind of confidence that only comes from finding out what you're made of. A girl who didn't know there were two different sizes of basketballs until she arrived at college on a scholarship she earned by showing up to catch for a women's team when she was 15 years old. A Southwest Airlines captain who mowed forty-two yards for ten years to fund his flight lessons. A surgeon who was told by a legally blind man in a small-town office that he should become a doctor and listened.

And more.

What strikes me, reading these stories together, is that none of these paths were straight. Most of them ran through a recalibration or two, a returned phone call, a different college, a door that opened in an unexpected direction, before they found their shape. And nearly all of them, no matter how far the road eventually ran, trace a line back to something foundational about growing up in this community.

The work ethic. The genuine relationships. The teachers and coaches who saw things in students before those students could see them in themselves. The neighbors who showed up for games, for harvests, for one another's worst days.

This publication exists to honor that foundation and to hold it up for the next generation of students who are sitting in the same classrooms, playing on the same fields, and beginning to wonder where life might take them.

The answer; if these eleven lives are any indication of what is out there for each student, is that you can go further than you think. In directions you haven't imagined. And, if you're lucky, back home.

We are proud of every one of our alumni. We are proud of our current students and the community that supports them, too for the road still ahead, yet untraveled.

With warmest regards,

Robert Waggoner Superintendent, Martinsville CUSD #5