Pillars of the Community

An excerpt from Notre Dame Magazine profiles our own Glenn Cassidy, Ed.D. ’90, (Notre Dame, Class of 1994) and the story of St. Benedict’s Prep and Newark Abbey. The feature article, written by Anthony DePalma, appeared in the winter 2025-26 issue of the magazine. 

Several times a year, scores of pilgrims from points distant make their way to one of the most remarkable Benedictine abbeys in North America. Unlike monastic communities that are perched atop majestic mountains or nestled within secluded groves, this singular abbey sits stoically, even stubbornly, where it has for more than 150 years — in the grubby concrete heart of the old and mostly unloved city of Newark, New Jersey.

The pilgrims — teachers, principals and other education professionals — come to witness the exceptional, 53-year experiment that the monks of Newark Abbey run here. These dedicated men have taken a traditional Catholic college prep that once helped untold numbers of families enter the middle class and totally transformed it, turning it into an unequaled model of urban education, a prep school attended mostly by Black and Latino youths — many from disadvantaged or dysfunctional families — that against all odds routinely graduates nearly 100 percent of its senior class, sends almost every alumnus on to college, and prepares them for life in ways no other school does.

What these curious visitors encounter is a prep school without pomp, pretense or patrician admissions. Entering from bustling city streets, they find students who other schools might barely tolerate leading daily assemblies, and doing it so effectively that it takes them no more than a raised hand to silence bleachers filled with roughly 800 city kids. They see how lockers are routinely left unlocked, students go all day without cell phones and classes are held 11 months of the year with few days off. They learn how the school treats the depression, anxiety and anger these city-toughened kids harbor, while expecting them to excel academically and adhere to high standards of honesty, empathy and compassion. They are astonished to discover that these teens routinely meet extreme physical challenges: enduring a rugged, week-long freshman boot camp, surviving a blistering 55-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail, and going through mock-disaster response training so demanding that it makes some parents squeamish — all of it meant to build character and foster teamwork. 

The curious educators all have the same question, and it’s not how the monks teach algebra, or which foreign-language program they use. What they want to know is how St. Benedict’s Preparatory School gets urban adolescents — a demographic generally considered among the most difficult to reach — to buy into a rigorous program of study, self-sacrifice and open-ended commitment to each other. And once they hear about the monks’ own stubborn commitment to this place, these kids and this city, they desperately want to know how they manage it in an era when truth is questioned, faith is challenged and empathy seems outpaced by envy, jealousy and suspicion.

The person they ask is Glenn Cassidy ’94. The man known to everyone as Cass clearly revels in busting educational myths, arguing in a calm, confident voice that most educators are going about it all wrong. No matter what academic programs or innovative trends are deployed in classrooms, he insists, urban education is undercut unless the students’ basic emotional and psychological needs are addressed. 

In short, it’s no use trying to reach the minds of these students unless you first attend to their hearts.

Cass knows this better than just about anyone because he was one of these kids from a fractured family who attended St. Benedict’s. After four years at Notre Dame, he returned to Newark, bringing some of the tradition and empathy he’d been exposed to at the University home with him. The mini-Afro he sported on campus vanished long ago. Now cue-ball slick, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, he is the director of the Fr. Mark Payne Institute, which works with public, private and charter schools around the country that hope to replicate St. Benedict’s success, and he is as enthusiastic about the school as any of the students who surround him.

“I bought into the Benedictine mantra of humility and the concept of pray and work,” of ora et labora, he says, explaining his 31-year tenure at St. Benedict’s. He had planned to work at the school for no more than three years, but it pulled him into its orbit and never let go. He applies to his own life the Benedictines’ unique vow of stability, which binds monks, in many instances, to the physical place where they took their vows. And he is an energetic evangelist for the long and strenuous process of building community that he encountered at Notre Dame, and which is at the heart of Newark Abbey and St. Benedict’s.

After a laudatory 60 Minutes report on St. Benedict’s in 2016 called its approach to urban education “rare and successful,” Fr. Edwin Leahy, the headmaster, was inundated with inquiries from around the United States seeking insight into how the school had managed to reverse the troubling national trends of underachievement among inner-city students. Public high schools in many cities have been labeled “dropout factories,” with rampant absenteeism, out-of-control violence and abysmal basic-skills test scores. St. Benedict’s near-100-percent graduation rate, and its similarly high college acceptance rate, are rare exceptions. In response to these inquiries, Leahy created an institute to assist educators seeking to duplicate some of these achievements. In 2018, Cass was tapped to lead the institute as executive director, and he renamed it in honor of his mentor, Fr. Mark Payne, who had died two years earlier.

Due to his long tenure at the school, Cass was an ideal messenger, but first he had to decode what makes St. Benedict’s so special. He took a hard look at his school and concluded that the monks, through decades of trial and error, had found a way to turn education on its head. Instead of emphasizing grades and high-stakes testing, they had drilled down on character, acknowledged the trauma many of their students suffered, and paid as much attention to the resilience of their hearts as to the agility of their minds. You can’t get these city kids to learn what’s in their textbooks, he argues, unless you can first heal what’s in their hearts. 

Read the complete article.

Anthony DePalma, a former New York Times correspondent and visiting fellow at Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, is the author of several books, including On This Ground: Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America, published by William Morrow in February 2026.