Jason Patera
Head of School
The Chicago Academy for
the Arts
I turned 16 in 1992, and I’d had my driver’s license for about a day when I told my boss several lies that totally changed my life: “Yeah, I have insurance. Sure, I’ve driven a delivery van before. Of course I know my way around downtown.”
An hour later, I pulled up to the doors of The Chicago Academy for the Arts to deliver sound and lighting equipment. Immediately I knew that this place was utterly unlike my neighborhood public high school, which was surrounded by barbed wire and had a half-dozen police cars out front at the end of the day.
The Chicago Academy for the Arts, founded in 1981, offers cocurricular academic study and pre-professional arts training. Alumni include Grammy winners, Broadway and TV stars, Sundance-featured filmmakers, principal dancers and critically acclaimed artists—as well as physicists, attorneys, architects, software engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals in a variety of fields.
I, of course, didn’t know any of this when I wandered in there. Kids from my neighborhood didn’t go to “independent” schools—I wouldn’t have even understood what one was. But I was immediately transfixed by the culture. Every corner of the building was filled with young people making fascinating art: actors ran lines in the stairwells, dancers worked on choreography in the hallways, and the jazz musicians seemed to be engaged in a perpetual jam right there in the lobby. They argued about art or politics or religion, seeming to care little about the childish things my peers and I thought about. I wanted to never leave. So I didn’t.
I quickly became something of an intern: I helped set up sound equipment, I assisted with student projects in the recording studio, and I’d warm up the jazz band before rehearsal. Later, I started playing drums or piano for musicals if the music department kids were unavailable. Within a year, several teachers, some administrators, and the head of school had all taken me under their wing. I was there every single day.
One day, one of the administrators sat me down for a talk. I was certain that rock and roll stardom was in my future, but Pam Jordan, now president of the Idyllwild Arts Foundation in California, had other ideas. She made me apply to college—and made me go. “You’re going to be a teacher,” she said. “And you’re going to teach here.”
That’s exactly what happened: On Friday, August 14, 1998, I earned my degree from Berklee College of Music. And three days later, I was in front of my very own classroom at the Academy. I knew then what nearly 2,000 students since 1981 have known: This was home.
The Academy is the only place I’ve ever worked in my adult life. Under Jordan’s mentorship, I went from intern, to teacher, to department head, to assistant head, to principal. And in June of 2016, I got the only job I’ve truly wanted since I was 16 years old: the Academy’s head of school. While I can attribute some of my success to things like hard work, patience, and luck, the most important factors are the culture and mentorship I accidentally discovered on that February day.
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