How a teacher took a shattered dream and made it soar

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Rory Jasper was in seventh grade at St. Joan of Arc School in the Riverbend section of New Orleans when it happened.

Elizabeth Chaten, a freshly minted graduate of the University of Notre Dame who was serving as a volunteer English teacher through the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) program, was cold-calling on her students to read aloud from “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” a novel about a child living in confinement during the Holocaust.

As Chaten called on one student after another, Jasper knew that his time for reading aloud to his classmates was only seconds away.

“Before she even got to me, I was pre-reading the page just to make sure I knew every word on the page,” Jasper recalled.

And then, his time was up. As Jasper began to read, he froze.

“I couldn’t even get through the first page,” Jasper said. “At that moment, I felt embarrassed. I felt ... less than.”

Chaten had not been a teacher for long, but what shined through in that tender moment was not a master’s degree in pedagogy but a treatise in Christian love.

Rather than intensify Jasper’s obvious humiliation, the young teacher quietly asked him to talk to her after class.

“She sat me down and made a plan to make sure that at the end of eighth grade, I was going to be able to go to the high school of my choice,” Jasper said.

In May, Jasper will graduate with a degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame, and in a testament to his life-changing moment in Chaten’s class, he will follow in his mentor’s footsteps and embark on a two-year program as an ACE teacher himself in hopes of transforming other young lives, just as his own had been by a simple act of kindness.

And by someone who believed in him.

Jasper already has had a few practice teaching sessions last summer when he was interning as a seventh-grade reading instructor at a Catholic school in Arizona.

“One of the big things was classroom management,” Jasper said. “The first day I asserted myself – not to be too mean – but the kids knew when it was time to come to Mr. Jasper’s classroom, it was time to learn. I didn’t even have to put my foot down a lot.

“We were in the middle of the pandemic, and the kids truly valued their opportunity to still get an education where some kids didn’t even have that chance. I taught them to be grateful that we could all be together to get an education and be healthy during these times of need and uncertainty.”

The ACE program for teachers has been around since 1994 and now places approximately 190 teachers in Catholic schools across the country, including several in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Some of the funding for the small stipends each volunteer teacher receives over two years comes from the College Football Playoff Foundation, which has helped raise about $3.5 million over the last six years.

“Hearing Rory’s story is one of the great blessings of this work, honestly,” said John Straud, executive director of ACE. “A lot of our teachers could be doing many other things – maybe making six figures at Amazon or Google. They are just really bright, dedicated and warm people.”

Jasper remembers his seventh grade as though it were yesterday. Four afternoons a week after school, for 45 minutes, he worked on his vocabulary and comprehension with Chaten.

“She made a promise to me  that she was going to stick with me, day in and day out,” Jasper said.

To lighten things up, Chaten brought in sports books that piqued his interest and even got him hooked on fantasy novels. By eighth grade, his reading scores surpassed his grade level, but twice he failed the competitive entrance exam into Ben Franklin High School.

“I went to her in tears,” Jasper said. “We had worked so hard for two years to get me to the point where I could succeed. She told me, ‘That was a short-term goal. Your long-term goal is to attend Notre Dame.’”

After excelling at Riverdale High School, Jasper willed his way to South Bend, and he hasn’t looked back since.

“She changed the trajectory of my life,” Jasper said.

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