I first met Jason Patera in 2017 when I was at the high school he leads, Chicago Academy for the Arts, to interview Zachary Jeppsen.

Jeppsen, at the time, was a 17-year-old ballet dancer who commuted six hours a day to attend a school where he wasn’t bullied for the thing that made him brilliant. Every weekday he would leave his Wisconsin farm by 5:30 a.m., hop a ride with one of his parents to a 6:22 a.m. train in Harvard, Illinois, decamp in Chicago, board a bus and arrive at school by 8:30 a.m.

After school, he would arrive home around 9 p.m., at which point he’d feed the family’s seven goats, tend to his other farm chores, finish his homework and get ready to do it all again the next morning.

“My initial feeling when I came here was, ‘Oh my gosh. I fit in,’” Jeppsen told me back then.

He went on to graduate from The Juilliard School.

“I feel so loved,” he told me shortly after he graduated from Juilliard in 2023. “And I feel that I got to become the person I am because I was able to find my people: my friends, my teachers.”

What could be better? That’s my fondest hope for my own kids. For all kids.

"Some other kid is going to come here in five years and feel like this is home," Patera said in 2017. "And he's going to feel like that because of the work that Zach is doing now."

I connected with Patera several more times over the years. When I meet a grown-up who carves out a space for young people to feel safe and loved and celebrated in a too-cruel world, I tend to keep them on my radar.

In 2020, I wrote about Patera traveling 400 miles with a crew of teachers and staff to hand-deliver diplomas to every one of his seniors — from West Dundee, Illinois, to Dyer, Indiana — when COVID-19 canceled graduation.

“You’d get a lot of, ‘No way. No way,'” Patera told me at the time. “And then the student is crying and the parents are crying and I’m crying and everyone’s crying.”

In 2019, I wrote about Patera’s Annual Dispensing of Unsolicited Advice, a road map he delivers to students every year at the senior lunch.

For example: “Develop the courage to be disliked. Have high expectations for the people around you. Think for yourself and don’t be afraid to express well-founded but unpopular opinions.”

In 2022, I wrote about his recovery from brain tumor surgery — a procedure that left half of his face paralyzed and his giant heart expanded. (Metaphorically on the heart thing, not medically.) His students sent him into that surgery with a box full of hundreds of letters wishing him well. One girl gave him the stuffed penguin she took into her own tumor surgeries. Surgeries, plural.

“I’m reading letters from kids who’ve gone through far more challenging things than I went through or am likely to ever go through,” he said. “And they’re offering wisdom and perspective, delivered with such kindness and compassion. If they’re engaging with the rest of the world with any level of that kindness and compassion? Our future’s bright.”

Now Patera is stepping away from his role as head of the school. He’s moving to Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of the academic year to serve as the head of The Cooper School. He married his longtime partner, Melissa, in 2023 and is relocating to be closer to her and his stepdaughter.

“After I got sick I learned that life is short, and sometimes life is very short,” he told me this week. “And I want to be close to my family.”

Patera will be succeeded by Melinda Zacher Ronayne, who serves as director of visual arts at the Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Before he leaves, a few things will happen. One is that Randy Duncan, renowned choreographer and chair of the dance department at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, will undergo kidney transplant surgery.

Duncan, who grew up on Chicago’s West Side and worked with dance companies around the world, has been living with chronic kidney disease and receiving twice-weekly dialysis treatments. Earlier this year his nephrologist told him it was time to find a new kidney.

“I found it very difficult to make this very personal health decision,” Duncan told me. “I did not want it to affect my students, who would be wondering if I was OK. I want my teaching to be about them, not me. So I hesitated for some time.”

Eventually, with Duncan’s blessing, the school publicized his kidney search.

“I assigned myself the role of gatekeeper,” Patera said, “thinking five to 10 people would call up and say, ‘I’m interested in giving Randy a kidney.’”

They were flooded with emails. And phone calls. And texts.

“We heard from colleagues, friends, more than a few former students, more than a few parents of former students, retired dancers, fans of the school, former employees of the school,” Patera said. “The medical center finally called me and said, ‘You have to stop referring people to us.’”

Eventually, they found a match, who is remaining anonymous.

Also before Patera’s last day, the school will have a spring festival and a senior lunch, where he’ll deliver his final round of unsolicited advice.

Patera will spend his final weeks overseeing a fundraising push, hoping to leverage an offer from the parents of an alum to match the next $1 million the school raises. Patera said the donations go to scholarships for students whose families can’t afford private school tuition, and to patching COVID-era deficits when enrollment — and performing arts in general — took a huge hit.

I asked Patera what he’s most proud of, as he gets ready to pack up and head south.

“I’m not proud of anything I’ve done, personally,” he said. “I’m proud to have been part of a place that cultivated in young people a drive to test the limits of what they thought was possible and go on to do pretty extraordinary things. Most of our culture dramatically underestimates what young people can do, and every one of us in this building has been watching over and over again as young people shatter those impressions. That gives me a lot of hope.”

I mentioned I thought he should be proud of giving those young people a safe space to be extraordinary.

“I didn’t create that,” he said. “I don’t deserve that credit. Forty-five years ago, a bunch of kids who didn’t fit anywhere else, in fact it might have been dangerous for them anywhere else, came here and formed this culture. I’ve always seen it as my job just to protect that. To find the threats to that and try to work against those threats. I hope I’ve been successful.”

It’s been a privilege to watch and report on what I saw, all of which feels like such a balm and a beacon — now more than ever.

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