MODELS OF INSPIRATION

Inspiration is often where you find it, and students at several Hamilton County schools didn’t have to look far to find it on Monday.

Thanks to anonymous local donors, students at Brainerd High School could find it at the Carmike East Ridge 18 theater as they watched the movie “Hidden Figures,” an Academy Award-nominated film that tells the story of black women mathematicians whose work was critical in the early days of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

One of the principals in the movie, the late Mary Winston Jackson, who had relatives in Chattanooga, became NASA’s first black female engineer in 1958. That was two years before Brainerd High, then an all-white school, opened, and when the city still had separate public restrooms and water fountains for whites and “colored.”

More than 150 students of the school, which is now more than 95 percent non-white, attended the viewing. Brainerd Principal Uras Agee said the meaning of the film was not likely to be lost on the students.

“They were smart in spite of all the obstacles,” he told this newspaper’s Yolanda Putman, referring to the movie’s subjects. “That empowerment came off the screen to the kids.”

Students at STEM School Chattanooga, meanwhile, demonstrated their inspiration by showing off their completed work — an invention that, among other things, uses thermal and ultrasonic sensors that will alert cars at stoplights and intersections with a crosswalk-like sign of the approach of a cyclist in a protected bike lane.

The school is one of only around a dozen across the country selected to participate in Lemelson-MIT’s 2016-2017 InvenTeams program and the first one ever selected from Hamilton County. Participation comes with a $10,000 grant and allows the school to showcase its invention — which officials believe could have a variety of global uses — at Massachusetts Institute of Technology this summer.

STEM School teacher David Wilson, a faculty adviser to the nine-member team, said he tries to encourage his students to invent the jobs they want to have in the future.

“Now they are getting to do that,” he told the newspaper’s Kendi Rainwater during the team’s demonstration before an audience at the Edney Building. “[T]hey are looking past graduation and seeing all of the opportunities.”

Earlier in the day, Tyner Academy students received a surprise visit from a former Chattanoogan who already has been an inspiration to many — singer Usher.

On the next to last day of Black History Month, the pop recording artist talked to students — who were told only they were attending a Black History Month program — for around 30 minutes about finding their passion in life and about celebrating their African-American heritage.

“The message that he gave the whole school was very inspiring,” student Kashius Alexander told WRCB-TV, “but the most important message he gave us was once we start something we shouldn’t just quit. He said things don’t always come easy when they start, and [we] should always commit to what we are doing.”

While Usher was in Chattanooga, he also attended a ribbon-cutting and dedication of the Nancy Ann Lackey Memorial Track at Orange Grove Center. While he lived in Chattanooga, he spent a lot of time in the home of a woman he called “Nanny,” who with her husband used to utilize the track at Orange Grove.

A gift from the singer helped widen, resurface and add lanes to the track that would accommodate wheelchairs.

Born Usher Raymond IV, the singer attended Dalewood Middle School before moving to Atlanta when he was 14. Having begun his singing career in a Chattanooga church, he went on to a singing and performing career and has became a multiple Grammy Award-winning artist. Last September, he returned to his former school and performed an outdoor concert. In a previous visit, he spent time at Orange Grove Center and Chattanooga Center for the Creative Arts.

Students at Brainerd and Tyner may not be able to envision themselves as a mathematician who becomes the subject of a Academy Award-nominated movie or a Grammy-winning pop singer, and students at STEM School Chattanooga may not see themselves with a career as an inventor, but they can and should take all the advice dispensed Monday to heart.

Be smart in spite of obstacles. Invent your future. Don’t quit what you start. Commit yourself.

If those life lessons can be internalized, all Hamilton County students can be on the way to success.