Ora Wills is a retired educator who taught for more than 40 years in Escambia County schools, including 25 years at Tate High School and 12 years as an adjunct professor at the University of West Florida.

Young minds in Pensacola rarely have had a greater champion than Ora Wills.

As the Pensacola News Journal's Troy Moon wrote on Nov. 21, Wills' contributions to making Pensacola a better place to live for all of her children was honored at her birthday celebration.

She has edited and written for numerous volumes of the "When Black Folks Was Colored" series, an anthology of Southern life during the Jim Crow years. She is the editor of "Images in Black: A Pictorial History of Black Pensacola," and, in total, has edited seven books for the African American Heritage Society.She is also one of the founders of "Arts Quest,'' a nonprofit organization that exposes local children to the performing and visual arts. Ora and her group take children to ballet performances, art galleries and other cultural events.

She still volunteers at area schools, even though much of her life has been spent in classrooms. She taught 46 years, and spent 23 of those years teaching English at Tate High School. She also taught at the University of West Florida for 12 years.

She's 80 now, so, to be honest, she probably has no more than 30 years left in her. So how would Ora like to remembered?

"As a champion of education and as a person who has tried to bring people together,'' she said, before diving into a birthday platter of fried catfish and shrimp. "So often, we're so divided as a community even though we're more similar than you might think."

Wills has been a champion of the important role that early education plays in a child's life. Her insights — earned over a lifetime of teaching and giving back — were invaluable in helping guide us through the reporting process for the Studer Community Institute's education report, published earlier this year.

That process highlighted not only the importance of improving our kindergarten readiness rate — which shows that a little more than one-third of Escambia 5-year-olds are not ready for school — and in raising our high school graduation rate — which stands at 66 percent.

Our reporting also found that when it comes to high school graduation, white students in Escambia graduate at about 70 percent, while the graduation rate for African-American students is about 50 percent.

Troy writes that the gap between white and black student achievement is where Wills is focusing her efforts now.

"I'm trying to launch an assault on that,'' she said. "We really need to get parents engaged with their child's education and development early on."