By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
Everyone has a Mrs. Warnecke.
Cindi Rigsbee’s life changed in first grade when the Bragtown Elementary School principal announced one day that Miss Ross ó Rigsbee’s teacher ó had too many students and part of the class would be divided out into a new classroom.
It was 1963 and apparent to Rigsbee that Miss Ross didn’t like her.
Rigsbee figured years later that Miss Ross probably had chosen the students she didn’t want, so it made sense she was one of them.
Rigsbee went with the other students down a long hall and into the school basement where a makeshift classroom had been set up.
Moss clung to the walls. Kids noticed some earthworms crawling around. And there were some beady eyes in a closet that the children decided never to open again.
When the new teacher, Barbara Warnecke, greeted her new class, she flashed a big smile toward Rigsbee. The little girl felt her heart open.
Mrs. Warnecke taught the class to read their Dick and Jane books and by the end of the year, Rigsbee was writing poems about stars, school and teachers.
As she moved on to second and third grades, Rigsbee kept writing and sharing her poems with Mrs. Warnecke, even though she wasn’t her teacher. When Rigsbee dropped by, Mrs. Warnecke always acted as though she were the only student who mattered.
Rigsbee was in fourth grade when Warnecke moved away. The teacher gave the little girl a poetry book, and they kept exchanging letters as Rigsbee moved into middle school. The last contact Rigsbee had with Mrs. Warnecke was in 1970, when the teacher was living in Buffalo, N.Y.
Fast forward to today, and Rigsbee is the N.C. Teacher of the Year and one of four finalists for National Teacher of the Year.
A middle school reading resource teacher from Durham, she already has logged some 13,000 miles meeting with school systems across the state as part of her year away from the classroom.
Rigsbee speaks of Mrs. Warnecke at every stop.
Her message: Every teacher has the chance to be a Mrs. Warnecke for someone. And most teachers already have made that kind of impact on a child, whether they know it or not.
Rigsbee spoke Thursday afternoon to the Rowan-Salisbury Teacher of the Year Council, where the audience included past, present and probably future Teachers of the Year in the system, school board members Linda Freeze and Jean Kennedy and school administrators.
Janice Raper, the past Rowan-Salisbury Teacher of the Year and one of nine Regional Teachers of the Year when Rigsbee won the state honor, arranged for her visit.
Raper remembered the three days the nine regional competitors spent with each other and the Sunday night dinner they had to kick things off.
“I can honestly tell you something,” Raper said. “I picked out the winner that night.”
April Williamson, a China Grove Elementary School teacher and the current Rowan-Salisbury Teacher of the Year, said her own Mrs. Warnecke was teacher Gerrie Blackwelder, who attended Thursday’s session.
Rigsbee kept her audience laughing and, at the end, crying.
By chance, Rigsbee had written to ABC’s “Good Morning America” about Barbara Warnecke, the impact the teacher had made on her life and how they had lost touch with each other.
The morning television show’s producers invited her to New York last summer to share the story. They produced and aired a segment about Rigsbee’s quest to find Warnecke, then interviewed Rigsbee afterward.
The surprise of the morning came when the show brought Warnecke onto the set.
Earlier, when producers had tracked down Warnecke and told her of a long-ago student who was trying to find her, she immediately asked, “Is it Cindi?”
Somehow the student and teacher had connected. In fact, it was Warnecke who had supplied a first-grade photograph of Rigsbee for the television segment. All these years, Warnecke also had kept a thank-you note Rigsbee’s mother had written to her
On the show, the two women, who hadn’t seen each other since 1967, embraced as Rigsbee asked whether Warnecke even remembered her. It was a silly question.
People all over the studio were crying, and others came out of the ABC offices and said they also had been blessed with a special teacher.
During her talks, Rigsbee shows the television clip to her audiences.
Everybody has a Mrs. Warnecke.
“We have the opportunity, the responsibility, the obligation to be Mrs. Warnecke for our students,” she added.
Rigsbee said she speaks a lot about dreams in her classroom. She starts every school year with her “First Day of School Motivational Dream Speech,” and she reminds her students that they all represent “someone’s dream come true.”
It means they have a lot to live up to, she tells the kids.
Rigsbee also speaks through the school year of the dreams and inspiration behind authors and whether dreams are realized. She requires every student to write his or her own “I Have a Dream” speech.
One of her favorites came from a middle school boy:
“I have a dream,” he wrote, “that someday Courtney will go out with me. I asked her once. She said, ‘No.’ I’ll ask her again when I’m her height.”