Two years ago, Hurt Park Elementary School was like a house caught in a mudslide. Enrollment was dropping, test scores were abysmal and leaks had sprung in the roof. Families were abandoning the neighborhood and its increasingly dilapidated rental housing, open-air drug markets and prostitution.

Teachers feared their school would be shut down, its students bused to better-performing schools and the building shuttered.

It was the smallest, poorest and one of the lowest-scoring schools in Roanoke. Slowly, inexorably, it seemed destined to fade. But that's not what happened.

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