Waterloo school offers 'Royal' diversity lesson
Academy blends lessons of religious faith and social justice
WATERLOO -- Chassidi Martin is living her dream, “keeping the dream alive” and bringing it full circle.
Five years ago, she and a business partner, Kendall Helmer, started a school -- literally on a prayer -- Royal Legacy Christian Academy. Amber Robinson is school principal. A couple of years later that school found a home in a former Waterloo Catholic school building, Sacred Heart School, which had closed.
“We pray for every family that ever came through this building,” Martin said.
That school, built in 1915, belongs to the same Catholic parish where her great aunt, local civil rights activist Anna Mae Weems, brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1959 to meet the pastor, the Rev. Msgr. E.J. O'Hagan, during a historic visit to Waterloo.
While other clergy were initially hesitant to greet King due to his social activism, O'Hagan, who had experienced Ku Klux Klan cross burnings as a young priest in Worthington in Dubuque County 40 years earlier, welcomed him. King spoke later at West High School and at what is now the University of Northern Iowa. Weems became acquainted with King through her activities with the United Packinghouse Workers of America, which supported King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Now, when students at Royal Legacy Christian Academy learn about King, they are learning about him on a campus that is a part of history.
”I feel deeply connected to that history — deeply connected to the history of my family, deeply connected to the extension of what was started here at Sacred Heart, and I feel hopeful where we’re going. Absolutely,” Martin said.
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The daughter of a firefighter, Martin attended Waterloo public schools and graduated from West High School and then Hawkeye Community College. She then attended Columbia College in Chicago, where she obtained a degree in marketing and public relations. Columbia emphasized communications and the performing arts.
“I had this idea I would come back to Waterloo and open a performing arts center," Martin said. "Theater's been some part of my heartbeat."
She came back and became involved in Shout Ministries, which she described as a “event and evangelism ministry -- bringing positive events to the east side of Waterloo and the north end” of the city.
"We hosted concerts, we did a 5K walk/run, sharing light and love in our community,” she said, “and to try to take some of that stigma off the east side of Waterloo," an economically disadvantaged, mostly Black part of the city.
That work in Shout Ministries prompted her to take the additional step and co-found RLCA with Helmer.
“Part of my journey here in Waterloo has been my faith journey,” she said. “My faith is the leader in everything I do.” She joined Harvest Vineyard Church in 2008 and attended a two-year ministry leadership training. It's where she and Helmer met.
"Kendall and I became fast friends," she said. They did Bible studies and each began raising their own families.
“We were discerning how we wanted to educate these little people,” Martin said. They considered home schooling. But she also enjoyed her own school experience as a young girl.
The leadership at Harvest Vineyard gave them permission to use the Sunday school rooms as classrooms. They started with preschool-kindergarten curriculum. "Because Kendall is a licensed Spanish teacher, she would teach in Spanish one week and I would teach in English one week, so we would alternate like that throughout the 36-week curriculum.
“And it was just great!” Martin said. “We were incorporating all the elements they we really wanted in education. The faith component was present, the bilingual component was present, and even just the life-on-life thing was there. We just really enjoyed teaching and learning together with our families and small children. And there was an interest as we were doing that: People would come in and say, 'Can I bring my kid?'
“It was then that we learned about Joshua Christian Academy in Des Moines,” Martin said. “It really caught our attention, because they seemed to be doing private education, Christian education, in a different way. They were attracting kids who wouldn't necessarily be your typical private school attenders. So we went and took a tour of that school and were very impressed. We were so impressed by what we saw. It was a predominantly African-American student body and a very diverse teaching staff. Not just culturally diverse, but they had two teachers who were in wheelchairs; the age diversity was present; the kids were in chapel, and they were leading the worship. They really wanted to be there.
“There were 8-10 kids in a class. It seemed like a family living room. They were really learning, and it seemed like the teacher was right there with them. My heart was just beating out of my chest. It was so exciting. We came back and said, ‘Okay, let's go. We're gonna do this!’ ”
“I was always trying to raise funds,” Martin said. “But man, the Lord provided for us in some miraculous ways financially. We've had people just come through with a nice donation right when we needed it.” She and Helmer also went without compensation.
“We always wanted to be debt free, so we never pursued any loans,” Martin said. :We did pursue grants,” which was a challenge as a faith-based organization. But they had some success, and in 2020 opened the “Legacy Littles” child care operation.
“Child care is such a big need in the Cedar Valley that we were able to write grants, and we did receive grants, to support our child care system,” she said. “Our child care program really supports the school.”
Another advantage has been the “educational savings accounts” made available by the Iowa Legislature, which go to families “so they can choose the education that's best for them.
“We started out on our own making private education affordable and accessible to families by shouldering part of the financial cost,” Martin said, under a sliding scale based on household income.
“Since the beginning, we want to make this accessible. You should have a choice in how you educate your child,” Martin said. “Before Royal Legacy in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls area, public school was not a choice, public school was the only option for many families. Not only was public school the only option, ‘this particular’ public school was the only option. So our goal has always been to provide another option, and removing that barrier of finances so that you can choose this other model if this school is best for your student.
“Educational savings accounts being passed definitely made that more readily available for families,” she said. “It took that financial strain off of us, and said, ‘Now you can actually access your own tax dollars and that will follow your child, and your child can go to a school that you want.’
“Our enrollment has almost doubled this year after ESAs,” Martin said. The school has an enrollment of more than 50 from infant through sixth grade -- 36 in K-6 and 15 from infant through age five.
“I can say pretty confidently that not one single family of ourselves even knew about ESAs outside of our own marketing. And it's because of the demographics that we serve,” Martin said. “The information about educational savings accounts has been really skewed to the point where families didn't know what it was. They didn't know what it meant for them. Your tax dollars are now available to you so that you can come to the school that you actually want to go to.
“That's been the case for us from the beginning,” Martin said. “Royal Legacy has been sort of a red-headed stepchild in the community. You either love us you don't,” she said, laughing. "Because of the faith-based and Christ-centered education we're offering, we get certain people who really love us for that. Because we do teach Black history here, very real critical race theory, people hate us for that or love us for that. We're very intentional about teaching history in reality, that's age appropriate and loving and all of those things.
“And we also are Christian, unapologetically, in all the things we do. There's definitely no separation,” she said. “And we also teach all of the academic content in very honest ways, to serve our children, to know history well. Because of those things, I don't know that everybody knows how to respond to us. ... We serve a God of justice. We teach justice and love. We teach truth and love.
“Our school is an African-American led organization,” she said. “One of our core beliefs is that cultural diversity reflects the community of God, and your ethnic identity should be explored and celebrated. That goes for every single child, every single background they come with. We want to celebrate their background and how it took all of us, all of us together. It is a good thing to know about history. And it is a good thing to know it took all of us working together to get to where we are and to get to where we need to be.
“When we started Royal Legacy, we started it for our own kids, because this is the kind of education I want for my own children,” Martin said. “The idea was to provide this amazing environment where my own kids would thrive. And it was wonderful that other kids could also participate in this wonderful model that I as a parent would also want for my kids. Personally, it has not been done without great sacrifice,” and time away from her own family, which required a balance.
“Women that go into some entrepreneurial endeavor, or, in our case, started a school, I don't think we're taught very well that we cannot do it all, certainly not at the same time. You just cannot,” she said. “I am with my kids, get to see them throughout the day," but school obligations, specifically fundraising, demanded a lot of attention.
“I feel like this the first year where I can be the chaplain, I can be in the classroom, I can be home at a reasonable hour and get dinner ready,” Martin said. “That balance, there's been a lot of hits on the family front to do this, if I'm being transparent. A lot of grace from my husband, a lot of grace from my kids. If you asked them, I think they would feel very proud. It warms my heart.
“Just as a woman in doing this, I would encourage women to take a step back from the noise of the culture: ‘You can do anything, and you can do it all.’ I would echo that sentiment, but I would also say, ‘including being a really good wife and a really good mom,’ ” Martin said. “That is not a lesser thing. That is actually the best thing you can give yourself to. And try to find opportunities, with all your amazing gifts, try to find some things that breathe life into that. We get to have great strong voices that teach us as women how to be the best wife and mom.”
For her, she said, Royal Legacy was an extension of those roles.
“The fact that Royal Legacy exists is mind-blowing to me," she said. “We saw a gap on education in the Cedar Valley that we really wanted for our kids,” Martin said. “We were literally doing this for our kids and wanted to make the world better for them and our community better for them.”
But she said it's hard to assess the enormity and impact of that undertaking when you're right in the middle of it.
All of a sudden, “You look up and you opened the school, which almost is surreal,” she said. “We are in our sixth year and accredited by the state of Iowa. That is something God did.”
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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Those two women are an inspiration. Private schooling, done right. Great story, my friend!
Fantastic article, Pat!