Board of Directors

Ms. Linda Hopping
State Director
Georgia Lighthouse Schools to Watch Program

Linda Hopping is State Director of the Georgia Lighthouse Schools to Watch Program, an initiative of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform. She is a former middle grades teacher and principal in Fulton County and has been involved in statewide middle school implementation and development in Georgia. While principal at Crabapple Middle School in Fulton County, Georgia, she established two highly successful multiage teams. In that capacity she co-authored an article, “Middle School Programs That Work” (Kappan, December 2000). She was a staff development instructor in her system where she taught Nature and Needs of the Adolescent Learner, a requirement for middle grades teachers in Georgia. Ms. Hopping is a past member of the Board of Directors of the National Middle School Association and serves on the NMSA Foundation Board. She has served as President and Executive Director of the Georgia Middle School Association, where she was the two time recipient of both the President’s Award and the Distinguished Service Award. She also received the Georgia Association of Educational Leaders Exemplary Leadership Award for her service to middle level education.

At the present time she serves on the Board of Directors of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform. Ms. Hopping co-authored an interdisciplinary Olympic curriculum for middle schools under the leadership of the United States Olympic Committee and later piloted the program in her middle school. It was adopted in middle schools throughout the country and served as the foundation for the Olympic Day in the Schools program for the Atlanta games. She was a member of the Education Task Force for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, represented the United States as one of four delegates to the International Olympic Academy in Olympia, Greece in 1994, and served as hostess for the Yugoslavian delegation during the 1996 Olympic Games. She is one of three authors of the NMSA Toolkit Assessment and serves as a lead consultant in that project.

< back to Board Members