I've heard many a dry, boring speech in my professional life and far too many gosh-awful, mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations.

When national education expert Robert D. Barr came to Mansfield (Ohio) City Schools Tuesday to set the stage for the coming school year, I expected more of the same.

I was dead wrong.

Barr, senior analyst for the Boise State University Center For School Improvement, electrified an audience of nearly 500 teachers, administrators and support staff. He kept their riveted attention for a full hour, shunning a lectern on the stage to speak without notes while walking the floor of the auditorium.

Barr had important education statistics to share, but it was his own story -- how the simple act of an elementary teacher changed the course of his life -- that had the entire auditorium standing and applauding, many with moist eyes.

The son of poor, illiterate Texas sharecroppers -- his mother dropped out after the third grade, his father after the second -- Barr described how his own formal education had barely begun before the principal declared that Barr had "no ability."

"As I was about to finish first grade the principal sent a letter home with me," he said. "We opened it and laid in on the kitchen table. My father couldn't read it, my mother couldn't read it and I certainly couldn't read it. We had to call the Baptist preacher to read it to us."

The letter summoned Barr's parents to a meeting at the school. His father refused to go, so his mother and grandmother accompanied him.

"The principal told my mother bluntly that I had no ability and that I would have to take the first grade over again," Barr said.

Barr's first-grade teacher, also present, intervened.

"She came over to me, placed her hand on my shoulder and said, 'I think whatever Robert might lack in ability he more than makes up for in determination.' I can still feel the touch of her hand on my shoulder. The principal relented and I went on to second grade."

Were it not for his teacher, Barr said, he might well have been pulled out of school and returned to back-breaking work in the fields.

Instead, he became the first member of his family to graduate from elementary school, an achievement which set him on the path to earning a doctorate in education from Purdue University.

"By then, my father was prouder of me. But he mistakenly told all the neighbors I had gone to Peru," Barr said, drawing laughter. Since Purdue he has written 12 books on education and served as a visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Along the way he was professor and director of teacher education at Indiana University from 1970 to 1981.

"I am here to tell you today: Never underestimate the touch of a teacher," he said. "You can make the difference in a child's life and break the bonds of poverty for a family."

Barr hammered at key points: "The foundation of all learning is reading. Nothing we do is more important than teaching kids to read.

"Kids live up to our expectations," he said. "You need to be careful that nothing you're doing is manufacturing low expectations and low achievement."

Barr recalled that when he was in high school in the 1950s, 50 percent of kids dropped out but still got good jobs.

"There were manufacturing jobs and other jobs you could do with your hands. That world has disappeared before our eyes," he said. "Today, in Mansfield and everywhere else, there is only one door of opportunity -- education. Without it, young people will live out their lives unemployed or underemployed."

Mountains of statistical data and new concepts in education have their place, Barr said as he closed, but nothing is as important as a teacher's impact in the classroom.

"I ask you to remember that had it not been for my first-grade teacher I might never have gotten farther than the sharecropping fields," he said.

"When you work with students this year, think back to Robert Barr and the touch of a teacher.

"I'll be there with you. I'll be there."

Larry Gibbs is the public relations officer for the Mansfield City Schools.