Growing up the second of five children on the wrong side of the tracks in white and wealthy Sudbury Mass., Deborah Long felt like the only girl in hand-me-down dresses and homemade sweaters for miles.

But she always had food in her stomach, even though sometimes food was leathery meat and other times it was tomato soup sprinkled with cheddar cheese. Long’s needs were satisfied, but her wants and dreams were a different story.

At 11, Long began babysitting the neighborhood children to earn a little pocket money. Shortly after enrolling in Lincoln Sudbury High School, Long obtained a work permit and rode her bike the few miles down the road to the local donut shop. She soon found herself working every day after school and on weekends.

“To this day, I can make a bottle of shampoo last a long time,” Long said. “You figure out exactly how little you can get away with, and still get your hair clean.”

Long vowed to clothe and provide for her future children, so they wouldn’t be shunned by their peers, like she was. Early on, Long learned the secret to success: a college education. Her children would all earn a degree, and she would foot the bill. .

“I’ve been able to give so much more to my children, because I’m financially stable,” Long said. “Education opens doors and opportunities and you can pass those on.”

But for Long, supporting her biological children was just the beginning. When the trio left the nest, she missed being a mother, missed tiptoeing the thin line between when to scold and when to hug, when to push and when to kiss.

Today, Long likes to say she almost 150 adopted children. The hundred and some are limited-income, first-generation college students from Alamance County.

That’s a lot of mouths to feed.

Long’s family grows by leaps and bounds

It all started in June 2006, when Cummings High School, an underperforming public school down the road from Elon, was threatened with closure. President Leo Lambert couldn’t let the school fail when Elon was doing so well. He turned to just the woman for the job: Deborah Long.

A college access program was decided upon, and Long needed to have a proposal to Elon’s senior staff by August. The clock was ticking. Long had never designed such a program, but she relished the challenge.

“I said to President Lambert, ‘Just know that I’ve never designed a college access program, and I’ve never been in such a program,’” she said “This was a new challenge, but I love a challenge. I was excited.”

With no funding and zero accreditation, Long didn’t know if the Elon Academy, as it came to be known, would leave the ground. No national grants would fund a program without a track record, so Long and President Lambert paid longtime Elon donors Edna and Doug Noiles a visit. By the end of lunch, the couple asked where to sign. The check for $220,000 sustained the academy well into its second year.

Though the money gave her breathing room, Long continued to worry. How would the students and families of Alamance County respond to the Elon Academy brochures mailed to each household in the district? Would anyone even apply?

“Are people going to trust us? Are they going to send their 14 year-olds to Elon for a month?” Long said.

In the fall of 2007, 80 applications arrived at Elon, and the Alpha Class of the Elon Academy was born. Though at first, some of the scholars cried, others became dreadfully homesick and a few rebelled, in the end they all began to grow and thrive and excel. Long was there every step of the way, though she’s quick to credit others for the Academy’s progress.

“I think the secret to the success so of the program is that I think I have a pretty good idea of my strengths, but my strengths are limited,” she said. “I think the key is to surround yourself with people who know things and can do things and have a skill set that you don’t have.”

As the leaves fell and the sky darkened, Long began to see herself in her children, black children, white children, Latino children. Long doesn’t see color. She sees potential. She sees poverty. She sees despair. And yet, Long finds hope in the hopeless child.

Long was once not so different from the children she now calls her own. Much of her life has been spent alongside people who were richer than her or poorer than her or lighter than her or darker than her. It’s not that Long seeks diversity. It finds her.

Clawing through college

Long never wanted to be a teacher. She stumbled upon psychology as an undergraduate at Colby College on scholarship. Colby was another white, wealthy world, and Long watched from the sidelines, often preoccupied by part-time jobs.

Most days a week, Long donned a hairnet and ladled out food in the school cafeteria. The cafeteria job paid her tuition. On the side, she babysat. She wouldn’t have spending money, otherwise.

“It couldn’t have been much more humiliating,” she said. “I was serving my peers. It was obvious I was one of the few low-income students, and it was another ‘look-at-me, I don’t belong here instance’.”

As a freshman, Long made one friend, her roommate. By the end of the year, her roommate became pregnant, married and left school. Ignoring her loneliness and brushing aside her hurt, Long dove headfirst into work, but she struggled to maintain the GPA she was capable of with so many challenges.

By working several jobs during the academic year, on holidays and in the summer, along with a series of loans and scholarships, Long bobbed financially above-water.

“I knew it, and it hurt,” Long said. “But I thought to myself, this is my life. This is the way my life is and I just have to endure it, so I can get my college degree and have a better life.”

A boy came next. Long started dating a student a couple of years older. In him, she found friendship, but at a cost, as he became possessive, and Long made no friends, save him. When the boyfriend graduated, Long had no one, again.

The next closest friendship Long developed was with a psychology professor who saw her potential when no one else did.

“You know when you meet someone and you think, ‘They really see something special in me?’” Long asked. “He made me feel like I was special.”

While the two didn’t discuss Long’s personal life, he encouraged her in a way her parents did not.

“I had to support myself, Long said. “It was interesting, because my mother was a teacher and she thought a college education was overrated and a waste of money. It was not encouraged. It any of us wanted to go to college, it was like, ‘You’re on your own. Good luck.’ I wonder if she said this because she knew that she could not afford to help us. Sending five children to college was impossible on my parents’ budget.”

One holiday, Long’s sister came home from school to let their mother know she had something to tell her. Her sister was dropping out of school.

"My mother said, ‘Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to tell me you were pregnant,’” Long said.

The road trip that changed everything

After graduating from Colby in 1970, Long’s struggles were far from over. No one wanted to hire a psychology major. The minimum wage jobs Long had suffered through all her life for the apparently useless diploma weren’t over.

Long found a low-paying job at a resort in Maine. There, she met two students on vacation from Duke: Bill and Hank. Somehow, they convinced Long to follow them back to North Carolina.

With every penny she had earned that summer, Long bought a used orange Opal Cadet and headed farther south than she had ever been.

After bouncing around between more low-paying jobs in Durham, where she lived, Long heard about the Teacher Corps, a national program that paid students with liberal arts degrees $90 a week to serve as teaching assistants at struggling, low income schools. At the end of two years, Long would receive a master’s degree she couldn’t otherwise afford, as well as a teaching license.

“I really didn’t want to be a teacher but I thought, ‘At least someone will pay for my education, and it’s better than waitressing,’” Long said.

She moved in with three black students in the same program, in a rented house outside St. Petersburg, Va. Courses were divided between Virginia State University and Virginia Commonwealth University.

“Growing up in New England, I hadn’t had much interaction at all with minority groups,” Long said. “You find out that you’re not so different, after all. It was fun. It was really fun. Sometimes I would feel left out, just because there are cultural things that are different, but we would always be laughing. I remember that, just making each other laugh until we cried.”

Home floats away

Toward the end of her two years in the Teacher Corps, Long’s parents traded her childhood New England home for a 22-foot boat. Long suddenly had no home for the holidays.

“Months would go by, and we wouldn’t hear from them,” Long said. “It was nerve-wracking, in a way, to be pushed that much further on my own.”

Master’s degree and teaching license in hand, Long trekked back to Durham in 1973. She accepted a job teaching the first grade at East End Elementary. Most of her students were black. Most of her students were poor.

“I felt right at home, because I had lived and breathed diversity with the students in my classes and with my roommates,” Long said.

In her second year, Long was confronted by the angry mother of an out of control child. The black mother accused Long of being racist for disciplining her child.

"I was hurt,” Long said. “It was really upsetting to me, because it wasn’t about race. It was about her behavior. But I began to think to myself, ‘am I racist?’ I really did a lot of soul searching.”

Slowly, Long developed a teaching style that stood in stark opposition to the conventional stickers and spankings handed out like candy at East End.

“We should treat behavior the same way we should treat academics,” Long said. “If a student doesn’t know how to write his or her name, you don’t spank them or take away their recess. You don’t punish because someone can’t something academically. Why would you punish because someone doesn’t know how to behave appropriately? It isn’t about punishing, it’s about teaching appropriate behaviors in a given situation.”

One of Long’s students cemented her ideas about teaching. Michael the first-grader stole a pencil from a classmate and stabbed another with it, leaving Long little choice but to send him to the principal’s office.

Long watched, horrified, as the principal spanked Michael.

“I saw the look on his face, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is so wrong,’” Long said. “Many of the children that I taught were abused at home. I couldn’t put them through that at school.”

The next day, Long apologized to Michael. Children are forgiving, she said. He looked at her with nothing but love in his eyes.

“That taught me that teaching is all about relationships,” Long said. “All of this giving candy for being good or giving silent lunch for being bad, I just can’t go there. It just doesn’t work and it’s inhumane.”

Starting a biological family

After three years in the Durham City School System, Long married and began a family of her own, leaving her adopted first-graders behind in North Carolina. It was hard.

“It could have been a movie, or maybe a dream,” Long said. “I loved these children. I loved their families. I still remember their names.”

Long moved to South Carolina and then Arkansas. She had three children of her own along the way, before the couple divorced. There was also a scare with a malignant strain of cancer that resulted in surgery.

A friend of Long’s pulled her back into teaching at Arkansas College, but her master’s degree prevented her from achieving tenure. Long resolved to earn a doctorate.

As a single mother, Long worked full-time, raised her family and studied for her doctorate. How? She’s still not entirely sure.

“I was young, and I was determined,” Long said. “I loved teaching college.

I just did it. I would take my children to the pool, and I’d have my textbooks and my papers I was writing. I just used every minute I could possibly use. To this day, I benefit from the time management skills I learned then.”

The accidental teacher couldn’t stop. After Arkansas came Elon and the Academy, where Long became a mother again.

She applauded the Academy scholars at their best, and she provided a shoulder to cry on in times of needs. Each one, Long got to know personally. She invited them over her Burlington home for fish taco nights. She read them her favorite poems, shared the quotations that inspired her.

Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son” is a favorite of Long’s. In the poem, a mother tells her son, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” Long’s life hasn’t been no crystal stair either, but she wouldn’t change a thing.

“That’s basically what I became to these students: a second mom,” Long said. “What I would do for my own children is what I would do for these children. When do you push? When do you hold back? When do you give a hug? When do you scold?”

Her children feel the same way. When freshman and Elon Academy graduate Mariam Rosales was overwhelmed by the rigor of the Academy, when some days dragged on and the studying never seemed to end, she knew just who to turn to.

“Dr. Long is a role model,” Rosales said. “She’s told us about her life history, and she’s always emphasizing perseverance, that even at your lowest you can make it work.”

Junior and Elon Academy graduate Desmond Harell remembers being asked to speak at the Elon Academy closing ceremony hours before it began his second year in the program. Dr. Long calmed Desmond’s nerves like no one could.

“My palms were sweating, voice crackled,” Harell said. “It felt like it was 100 degrees on stage, and I stuttered every other word. I even turned around to Dr. Long who was sitting behind me and said, ‘I can't do it.’ She replied, ‘You're doing great. Take a deep breath and keep going.”

After he spoke, Harell realized what Long had seen in him all along.

“I made eye contact,” Harell said. “I didn't have my hands in my pocket. I didn't move too often, and most of all, I didn't quit. I left the stage realizing that I applied all the skills I learned in the Elon Academy.”

Nothing makes Long’s heart swell more.

“When they walk in the door, it’s like my child has come home. When they're successful, it’s like I’m the proud mom, and I hope that I’ve had something to do with that.