Rooted in the Black Belt: The Enduring Spirit of Amelia Love Johnson School

Amelia Love Johnson is one of ten schools in the Black Belt participating in the GRAD Partnership, a national initiative aimed at fostering student success systems in schools. Annah Rogers, Black Belt GRAD Partnership lead and assistant professor at the University of West Alabama, leads the work to collaborate with Black Belt schools on their student success system journey as part of RSC’s GRAD Partnership Rural Cohort. Student success systems are a way of organizing a school community to better support the academic progress, college and career transitions, and well-being of all students. The University of West Alabama anchors RSC’s Black Belt Regional Hub.

It’s a new year and era for Amelia Love Johnson School, but in many ways what’s old is new again in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt region. The 2025-26 school year welcomed A.L. Johnson’s first-ever female principal, Mrs. Shemia Jackson Wilson, capping a twenty-year education career that has spanned across the state of Alabama. She brings energy, a focus on relationships, and dedication to serving the rural students of Marengo County that echo the school’s founding.

In the early 1920s, the Johnson family of Thomaston, AL, donated five acres of land that became the site of the school now known as Amelia Love Johnson. Originally consisting of only three rooms and as many educational staff, Amelia Love Johnson served as one of the founding teachers. Beloved by students and families, in 1976 the school took on her name. While many schools are named after presidents, governors, or famous generals, in a school dedicated to providing opportunity to students that live in Alabama’s rural Black Belt, where many face significant challenges early in life, it is fitting that the building bears the name of a woman who committed her life to uplifting the lives of her students and community.

Early returns on Mrs. Wilson’s first few months are strong: on the day the GRAD Partnership team visited, she was in the midst of planning a secret party for her teachers to celebrate the school’s state letter grade being lifted from a ‘D’ to a ‘C’ rating (unfortunately for A.L. Johnson, the state’s rating formula does not take their high graduation rates into account, as they graduate fewer students than the minimum threshold for tally). Mrs. Wilson notes that fostering strong adult-adult relationships in the building is paramount to her philosophy on building school culture, as she believes that it trickles down to adult-student interactions. While Mrs. Wilson is new to the GRAD Partnership work, her intentions echo a core focus of student-success systems.

Strong, supportive relationships are one of the four core essential elements of high quality student success systems, and the GRAD Partnership describes how these relationships manifest in school cultures of belonging: “Adult relationships go beyond interactions where adults feel affirmed to having a culture of professional trust where it is safe to have difficult conversations with each other about tasks, policy and data.” Walking with Mrs. Wilson throughout an afternoon, it is hard to believe she has only been at A.L. Johnson a few months; she has close relationships with both teachers and support staff that belies her recent hiring.

The students have taken note, and speak positively about both Mrs. Wilson and the educational environment around them. A.L. Johnson will be graduating nine seniors this year, and all of them are on the school’s honor role. Sitting down in conversation with the RSC team, the students lauded school leadership, community support, and the opportunities provided to them. Jaynisha, a senior, describes that “we have a whole community that’s dedicated to the school.” Kimora, also a senior, concurs, reflecting that: “I feel like we have a good environment around us.”

Another challenge that Mrs. Wilson has taken on in her first year focuses on gathering accurate attendance data. Previously, all absences were treated equally, but she noticed that many students were unable to attend class due to issues in transportation. Student success systems encourage schools to think critically about the data they collect and how to make that data actionable, another of the four core essentials. “A student should not just be counted as absent because their bus didn’t come and they had no way to get here,” she explains. Like in many rural areas, reliable transportation is a key issue facing A.L. Johnson.

Students come from a wide swath of land across rural Marengo County, and if the bus driver is sick on any given day, many have no other choice but to stay at home. The root of the issue is a lack of available drivers with CDL licenses, which impacts both transport to and from school, but also transportation for students taking CTE classes elsewhere in the county during the school day. In the week that RSC visited, for example, there had been three different instances of students not having transportation to attend class, and it was only Wednesday.

Even though there are still times where students can’t show up for class, as the school works through that, leadership continues to show up for them. Marengo County School District Superintendent, Dr. Kalvin Eaton, has been on listening tours to all three of the district schools, and has met with students one-on-one to solicit their feedback and ideas. This includes even small building improvements, which when completed have made students feel noticed and important.

Similarly, Mrs. Wilson has made a point to greet each student every morning as they enter the school. Over lunch, she eats with the students in the cafeteria every day, and encourages students to drop by and bring up any topic they wish to discuss. Small details like this transform new leaders into trusted adults in the building, and help schools to strengthen the strong, supportive relationships that are crucial to student success systems.

There is not a way to know for certain, but with only three rooms in the original school building, it seems likely that Amelia Love Johnson once ate lunch with her students, too. Living in a small town, she and her pupils were neighbors, all part of the same communal fabric in small-town Thomaston. It was a small school that gave students hope for a better future, and that’s what Mrs. Wilson sees at A.L. Johnson today as well: “Some of these kids here– they have a chance here that they wouldn’t in a big school. This school is a diamond in the rough.”

Rural Schools Collaborative would like to thank Dr. Annah Rogers for her facilitation of our visit to the Alabama Black Belt, and for her innovative leadership to support the ten participating GRAD Partnership schools in Alabama and Mississippi.