At The Altamont School, Principal Cecil Stodghill’s story begins long before he ever stepped onto the Birmingham campus, rooted instead in a classroom miles away, where a teacher saw something in him that would ultimately shape not only his future, but the futures of hundreds of students he now leads.
“I grew up in a very urban area in Chattanooga,” Stodghill said, reflecting on his early years. Raised in a single-parent household, he describes his upbringing candidly and without pretense. “If I may, I grew up in a hood,” he said. “But I realized that education was what would get me — and everybody else — out.”
That realization did not come on its own. It was sparked by Linda Clark, his fifth-grade teacher at Orchard Knob Elementary School, who recognized a potential in him that he himself had not yet fully understood. “To this day, I still don’t know what it was,” he said. “But she felt that I had a little more horsepower than was afforded to me.”…