Helping ‘Invisible Kids’ Succeed

Former high school teachers William and Robbie Hedges are dedicated to helping the “invisible kids” in America’s schools.

“At each school we taught, Bill and I had some really fine young people in our classes who had fallen just a little behind the learning curve,” said Robbie Hedges. “In the smaller schools we could do a great deal of individual work with the students and help them. But our schools have kept getting larger and those marginal learners tend to be overlooked.”

Bill and Robbie Hedges first met while teaching high school in northern Arkansas in the late 1940s. He was a World War II veteran completing an engineering degree in his off hours; she was a history and business teacher freshly graduated from Oklahoma’s Northeastern State College.

Together, the two would go on to put in more than a half-century of service as educators. Bill earned a doctorate in education from Vanderbilt University, and spent the final 20 years of his career on the faculty at UF’s College of Education. Robbie taught until the family’s move to Gainesville, when she shifted her attention to raising their sons and doing volunteer work for Shands at UF.

All along, the couple felt a particular concern for a group of children often forgotten in schools: students who aren’t diagnosed with a learning disability, but still lag behind their peers in academic progress. After their retirement, the couple pledged almost $2 million – acquired from the sale of family land – to create the Willam D. and Robbie Hedges Research Fund, dedicated to finding ways to reach these students.

“We hope in some small way to generate more attention and research that yields a more pleasant and productive experience for this frequently overlooked and neglected segment of our school population,” Bill Hedges said.