When Phyllis Crain became the executive director of The Crossnore School in Avery County 10 years ago, she asked children there to help her make Crossnore a better place.
Most of the children at the residential foster-care campus come from backgrounds of abuse or neglect. They wrote her notes about how they would like life to be.
"They dreamed of living in a real neighborhood, with a backyard, a swing set and a puppy," said Crain, who took the children's notes and developed them into a plan that has been through the addition of cottages, an education building and an endowment that has grown to $18 million.
And every cottage has a dog.
Crain's work as an advocate for children was recognized yesterday with the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation's Nancy Susan Reynolds Award, presented during a luncheon in Raleigh.
The state's two other recipients of the 23rd annual awards are Benny Bunting, a Martin County farmer who works to help farmers facing financial ruin; and Benny Nichols, the fire chief of Fayetteville, who has worked for better race relations. Each award includes a $25,000 prize -- $5,000 for the recipient and $20,000 for the nonprofit of his or her choice.
The Crossnore School serves ages 1 to 21, and typically has about 70 children enrolled.
Crain had been the school superintendent in Avery County for four years when she took the job at Crossnore, which was founded in 1913 by doctors Eustace and Mary Martin Sloop. The mountain school helped break the cycle of poverty for many of its children. When public schools became available in the area, children continued to live at Crossnore but attended Avery County schools.
Methamphetamine replaced moonshine as the area's new scourge. Some parents who had a choice of drugs or their children chose drugs. Many children faced other problems.
Crain decided that they needed an educational program structured just for them, and put the "school" back in The Crossnore School. She worked to open the Crossnore Academy charter school and the Wayne Densch Education Building, which was dedicated in 2001.
But when Crain used the children's notes to develop the 25-year master plan, she didn't know just what long odds she was facing. She learned seven years ago that she had metastatic breast cancer, and was told that she had little time to live.
She worked through her treatments, completing the long-term building campaign in the short time that she thought she had.
"Miraculously, there is no active cancer right now," said Crain, who has been approached about being part of a study for extraordinary patient outcomes for which there is no scientific explanation.
"Battling some pretty impossible odds has given me some insights into what abused children battle," she said. "They face some long odds. We're kind of in it together beating those odds."
Bill Joyner, a retired vice president of Wake Forest University, said he was introduced to Crain by a friend who said: "I have an angel I want you to meet."
He said that he found her to be one of the most remarkable people he has known -- full of energy and fight, both for her health and her kids.
"You cannot be around her without feeling goodness," Joyner said. "She's the closest thing we have in our state to Mother Teresa."
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.
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