Faculty Spotlight: Alejandra Correa, Executive Director and Co-Founder
For Alejandra Correa, Executive Director and co-founder of Chesterton Academy in metro Detroit, the decision to open a Chesterton Academy in the Detroit area initially seemed like a “crazy mission.” Neither she nor her husband, also a co- founder, “knew the first thing about opening or operating a high school.” However, confident that “God was in charge,” they knew that all would work according to His plan. In addition, they knew they could rely on the powerful intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Saint John Paul II. According to Alejandra, “we started this journey on the eve of [Our Lady’s] feast day, 2017” and she has “been with us since our very first meeting to gauge the interest level within the community.” As for Saint John Paul II, who has been important to Alejandra ever since she studied in Rome years ago, Alejandra feels that he too has accompanied her and her husband on this journey.
It is a journey that was rooted in Alejandra’s experience as both a Catholic schoolteacher and a mother. After she and her husband had their first child, Alejandra knew that she “wanted a school that would teach and support the Catholic values we teach at home.” And more, Alejandra knew she wanted something different: “I want our children to not only love to learn but to be lifelong learners.” Through her parish’s homeschooling group, Alejandra discovered classical education and knew that “it would be a perfect fit.” Searching for local classical schools, she came across the website of Chesterton Academy in Minneapolis. When she and her family visited a few years later they “fell in love.” Alejandra’s experience as a veteran high school theology teacher with a masters degree in theology also meant that when she “discovered the pillars of Chesterton: joyful, classical, affordable, and unabashedly Catholic,” she knew that “we needed a Chesterton in Detroit.”
As a co-founder, Alejandra and her husband will work hard to ensure that Chesterton Academy remains faithful to the pillars and mission that first inspired them to open up an academy in Detroit. Alejandra will also be teaching theology this year. She looks forward to “working with passionate colleagues who believe that our youth are able to live up to very high expectations” and who are themselves “in the pursuit of all that is true, good, and beautiful in this world.” She hopes to help students become “independent thinkers who first and foremost seek to know, love, and serve Christ.” As she did when following God’s call to co-found Chesterton Academy, Alejandra expects God to lead the way in the classroom. For Alejandra, Christ is “our primary teacher in Mass through the Most Holy Eucharist.” From Him “everything else follows naturally and beautifully.”
When asked why high schoolers and their parents should consider the school she founded, Alejandra explained that “there is no better education than an education that rides on the shoulders of giants, the great minds of history, our church, and western tradition.” By providing such an academic focus, Chesterton Academy offers “not only an exceptional education but also provides students with the opportunity to know and love Christ in a deeper way and learn that, with Christ at the center, life is an adventure and a great love story.”
Such a perspective on life is one entirely in keeping with the ethos of G.K. Chesterton himself who, according to Alejandra, “has first and foremost made me realize that the gift of wonder and awe is a great doorway to discovering the goodness of God.”
We give thanks to God for the courageous yes of Alejandra and her husband that has made Chesterton Academy possible!
