In the southwest corner on the second floor of Kesicki Hall, afternoon sunshine beams through the giant windows of Dr. Mary Ann Vogel’s office—if you want to call it an office. It’s more of a nook, really, crammed with full bookcases, some plants, trinkets, icons, a desk, and television. The space opens out to the main learning floor of The Welsh Academy, no door to block the joyful noise of student learning. All that separates Vogel from the busyness and business of middle school life is a makeshift sign taped up that says ‘Meeting in Progress.’
Barely out of sight and around the corner, Writing and English/Language Arts teacher Gerard Hall holds his students’ attention as they work through the day’s lesson, with some students seated at tables, and others perched on a large, U-shaped couch.
Only a few of the boys are in Vogel’s sight line from her desk as she tells a story about this beautiful enterprise all around her.
“I look at some of those early pictures of the 1900s, of Saint Ignatius College, and you can tell that there are middle school aged boys in that picture,” she says. “So I’m really proud that we took what the early Jesuits did here and we brought it back full circle.”
As Principal of The Welsh Academy, Vogel has spent the last four years both leading implementation of the decades-old dream to open a middle school for Cleveland boys from families of modest economic means—and steering it through its creation to its full manifestation today, with three grades of students and a roster of talented teachers. Oh, and doing all of that while contending with the unplanned challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Soon enough, on May 25, the first class of eighth graders—the first middle school students going to school on campus since the early era of Saint Ignatius High School—will graduate from The Welsh Academy. And that remarkable truth fills Vogel with pride.
“I am unbelievably proud of them because they were entrepreneurial, their parents were, on taking a chance on something that didn’t exist, even though we’re connected to Saint Ignatius and everything that comes with Saint Ignatius. This didn’t exist before,” she says.
Yet the idea for this type of school at Saint Ignatius, actually, has existed for decades, dating back to the 20-year presidency of Rev. Robert J. Welsh, S.J. ’54. There’s a massive three-ring binder to prove it. It landed in the hands of Dan Dixon, S.J., who spent three years at Saint Ignatius and was tasked in 2017 with leading the feasibility study to determine if an academy school could meet a need in Cleveland.
Dixon’s work effectively dealt with conversations and questions, long before there was ever any sort of answer.
“That first year it was a lot of people on the board and in the community wondering. It was really different for a school like Ignatius to be thinking about this, almost out of our comfort zone in a way,” Dixon says. “Was there enough interest and desire to keep it going? I met with about 75 people, teachers, alumni, other school leaders in the Cleveland area and urban community; I spoke with them and heard from a lot of perspectives how people felt and what concerns they had. The concerns were not ‘This is a bad idea.’ Those conversations made the plan better.”
“The first year was letting the spirit move the thing forward in the spirit’s own time and way,” he says.
Dixon’s tireless work did not yield an immediate green light for the school. Questions about everything from the admissions landscape to finances to facilities and staffing continued to emerge. Ultimately, however, the board decided it had enough answers to move forward with implementation.
Current Saint Ignatius President Fr. Ray Guiao, S.J. ’82 had known Vogel for years, from when Vogel was the founding principal of St. Martin de Porres High School in Cleveland and Guiao was on their board. She was, in his mind, necessary to the conversations taking place. Vogel listened to Guiao and Dixon, but drawing from her wealth of experience in urban education and independent schools, she pushed them on whether this academy was really the right thing to do—and whether there was the will to see it through.
“Me challenging them made them think about it a little bit differently from the eye of someone who’s opened a school before,” Vogel says. “I also think that in that conversation, he was like, ‘Oh, I think she might be the right person to do this’. I don’t know if he was thinking about that yet, but that was part of it.”
At a turning point in her own career, Vogel initially rejected Guiao’s offer to lead the implementation of the academy. But at a conference called Schools That Can, a speaker’s words sparked an a-ha moment.
“I listened to this person and I thought, ‘Oh, I actually do want to do this,’” Vogel says. “God really hit me at that conference.”
And so she came aboard, worked with Dixon, drafted guiding principles, and started on the incredible enterprise that has led to the full schoolhouse on the corner of West 32nd and Carroll Avenue today. It’s work of creation that, even since the first class entered in 2019, has been non-stop.
“For the first three years, we have been building something from scratch every year,” Vogel says. “Every year the schedule looks different. Every year you’re building a new curriculum, right? We didn’t have an eighth grade curriculum this year, so teachers are finessing a sixth and seventh grade curriculum and writing an eighth grade curriculum. So the hours are long—they’re intense. The kids are intense. The kids are great. They come with a lot: a lot of gifts, a lot of challenges, and we try to get them ready for the stage that’s after us.”
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Community is, perhaps, an important word that comes to mind when one observes life at The Welsh Academy. Students sit together on a giant staircase to start the day with the morning meeting, an active gathering led by teachers and students. English/Language Arts teacher Mike Murphy ’09 stands up front, running the slides to match the agenda. Yet students take attendance, lead prayer, offer intentions, and provide facts of the day. As the meeting ends, the energy builds once again as the boys scurry off to their first classes of the day, spread throughout Kesicki Hall.
The space itself is quite unlike a traditional middle school building. A couple rooms have desks, but most learning spaces are modular and feature couches, tables, and movable screens—lots of pieces fitting together in different ways, which is a good analogy for the curriculum in place. Murphy takes advantage of technology as he guides his 7th-graders in a discussion about letters written to Congress regarding U.S. involvement in the recent war in Ukraine. It’s a lesson in writing, forming an argument, and correct grammar tied into material that is equal parts current events, geography, history, and government, on which he collaborated with History teacher Christina Palmer.
“We think a lot about how we get the students to buy into it, and I think the realness of it got them to buy in,” Murphy says.
Prior to returning to Saint Ignatius, Murphy taught in Boston at a Nativity school, which shares a similar mission to the academy. His name kept coming up as Dixon was doing all his planning; everyone who knew Murphy said he would be a perfect fit. He joined the first team of teachers in 2019.
“It’s why I wanted to be here,” he says. “Everything was new. Everything is on the table with Mary Ann. You could come to her with any idea, and she’s going to hear it and honestly probably give you the green light for it, and honestly that’s what makes it so fun.”
And just as Murphy came along, so too did students and families—even when there was no school building to walk through, no faculty yet present, no history, nor tradition, other than what came from being a part of the high school.
“When I heard about Welsh, I was kind of skeptical because I had never been to a private school, let alone being an all-boys school,” says eighth grader Chidi Okaodu who will attend Saint Ignatius in the fall. “When I heard how it was connected to Saint Ignatius, the first thing that came to my mind was that it’s going to lead to bigger opportunities in the future.”
“All of us together, we’re all really good friends,” says Xander Kraguljac, another soon-to-be Saint Ignatius freshman. “The first day, I remember it was dead silent at lunch. Everybody was trying to get into it. And then the first month into school everybody was friends.”
Those first students and families really were pioneers. Everything they did was a ‘first,’ and also a learning process for everyone. For these eighth graders, their journey through The Welsh Academy was not just unique—it was special.
“I also know this group of guys had an experience that no one else will ever have at The Welsh Academy,” says Vogel. “No one else was the only class here for a little period of time in two separate buildings with only seven people just making sure this was a smooth beginning year for them. So they know us in a way that none of the other kids will ever know us, and we know them in a way that’s very different.”
It’s a wonder what each boy’s experience of spring 2020 would have been like had his family not made the decision to send him to The Welsh Academy. The Welsh team did whatever they could to see that first year through.
“They went to school every single day,” Vogel says. “They had hot spots. They had a computer. We had recess with them online. We never missed a beat because of COVID. And those are some things I’m proud of because, in their local schools, they would have gotten packets and they would have been further behind. So I know we did better by them.”
This class, however, also did better by the academy by simply being the first group of boys. They started traditions. They tested rules. They explored new interests. They built deep relationships. They made the school better just by choosing to be a part of it.
And that’s one of the most exciting facets of where The Welsh Academy is going, as ten of its first students enter Saint Ignatius in the fall. Their influence on the life of the school is truly only beginning.
On June 1, the academy will welcome its fourth class of sixth graders to campus with their now-traditional family welcome night. For the first time, however, they will use this event also to present the incoming Saint Ignatius students with a blue blazer, sort of as a final piece of their high school preparation.
“I’m hoping that that’s the first thing a sixth grader sees is: ‘I belong here. I’m going to go to this high school. I’m going to get there,” Vogel says. “They can see the literal connection between the two.”
It is a sure thing that The Welsh Academy will continue to evolve in the same ways that Saint Ignatius High School has evolved for over 135 years. Vogel says as much, having learned valuable lessons from the past three years about how to better meet her students where they’re at. All the while, the academy has Saint Ignatius history in its core.
“We are educating kids of immigrants. We are educating kids from the City of Cleveland,” Vogel says. “We are educating kids who didn’t believe, and maybe their parents didn’t believe, that they have a right to this kind of education. That’s what I’m really proud of.”
Credits:
Gary Yasaki