“The value of an education has no price. It?s sad when a person doesn?t know how valuable it is,” said Genevia Jackson, a 73-year-old Baltimore grandmother, who hopes to obtain her General Equivalency Degree this fall.

Born in the deep South in the middle of the Great Depression, Jackson did not attend school until she reached 10 ? and then only from January to March, so that she could help her sharecropper mother in the fields. She estimates that she received no more than nine months of formal education as a child.

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