Sunday, June 03, 2007
Drive & devotion
In March, Extra asked women to write letters to their younger selves about what they've learned from life's experiences. We received more than two dozen letters and have shared the wisdom through May. In each part of the series, Extra has profiled one of the women who responded. The series concludes today.
Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times
Bernice Cobbs credits her family's support and sacrifices as she pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees toward her teaching career.
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May 26
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Here is the way life turned out for Bernice Cobbs, whose father worked on a tobacco farm, and who worked herself as a secretary after high school but never stopped dreaming of a better life:
A decade and a half after graduating from Franklin County High School, she was working in a court clerk's office and seeing people every day who had been to college. Cobbs sometimes wondered what those people had inside of them that she didn't have herself.
Finally, she figured it out. Nothing.
So Cobbs, the African-American daughter of a sharecropper, and a mother of two, went to a community college to see what could be done.
Fourteen years later, Cobbs, now principal of Snow Creek Elementary School and working on her second master's degree (she has one already from the University of Virginia), can see how that day changed her life.
Cobbs was one of dozens of people who responded recently to Extra's invitation for women to write letters of wisdom and advice to their younger selves.
In Cobbs' letter, she recalled her life-changing decision to go to college. "It all boiled down to making the first step," she wrote.
Cobbs was 32 when she went to Virginia Western Community College to talk to a counselor about her dream of becoming a schoolteacher. Her husband and lifelong friend, Hildred, was at her side.
Cobbs can't remember the name of the counselor she spoke with that day, but she wishes she did.
"She knew exactly what I needed," Cobbs recalled. "She asked all the right questions. She was very kind. After that, I knew it was going to be okay."
Cobbs quit her job at the clerk's office and began to go to school, day and night.
It wasn't easy, she admitted. "I'm not going to tell you there were not a lot of sacrifices on everyone's part. A lot."
Hildred stepped up, taking care of their two children after coming home from work each day at three. Cobbs thinks it was good for Bradley, a recent graduate of Carson-Newman College, and Kimberly, who just finished her first year at Virginia Commonwealth University, to see how their dad supported her in those years. "They grew from that, too."
Some hard-working men might have felt resentment upon seeing their wives leave decent jobs to pursue higher education. Threatened, too. Hildred Cobbs, a Norfolk Southern Railway car inspector who has known Bernice since grade school, said he never opposed his wife's new career path.
"It paid off," said the soft-spoken railroad worker. "The whole family has been improved by what she's done. I look at it like that."
Cobbs, paying for her education partly with grants and scholarships, crammed a two-year program into one school year and a summer term at Virginia Western, and then transferred to Ferrum College to earn her bachelor's degree.
She didn't stop there. While working as a fifth-grade teacher at Boones Mill Elementary School, she also earned a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Virginia. She went on to study at Radford University to earn the credentials to become a school principal, and continues to take classes there.
In 2004, Cobbs was chosen Regional Teacher of the Year for Region VI, which covers 15 school systems from Alleghany County south to Pittsylvania and Floyd counties. She was named principal of Franklin County's Snow Creek Elementary School in 2005.
Ask her what kind of a educator she is, and the word Cobbs uses is "effective."
Is she tough?
"I have high expectations," she said.
And don't even try to tell her you can't do something.
"I don't like that."
Cobbs was jogging with friends at 5:15 one morning -- the only time available in her busy day -- when she announced she had decided to respond to the newspaper's invitation to address her younger self. Some other women out there -- and young black women in particular -- might read it and take heart, Cobbs thought.
The message she hopes people will take from her life's journey so far is this:
"If God did it for me, He'll do it for them," said Cobbs, 46. "Stay focused. Be respectful. And just have faith."
