On with the show: Alum creates magic onstage at Sullivan High School

Before Zepeda was a social worker putting out fires in the halls of Sullivan High, he was a kid growing up in Chicagoland with his own challenges.

“I didn’t read a book until college,” he says. His ADHD made reading difficult.

He enrolled as an undergrad at Loyola University Chicago and opened up to his professor about this. “I took a Theology and Literature class with Father Mark Bosco. He was a priest, and I confessed to him that I’d never read a book,” he says. But that was about to change. “He said, ‘If you want to pass this class, you’re going to have to read a book.’ So I ended up reading my first full novel.” With Father Bosco’s encouragement, Zepeda trudged through Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene. “It was hard to get through that,” he says. But when he did, he gained the belief that he could keep reading.

During his undergraduate years, he also did an internship at DePaul University, studying depression in Latino adolescents. Zepeda, Latino himself, says this work resonated with him, and he wanted to follow the thread in some way.

While Zepeda applied to PhD programs right out of undergrad, he didn’t get in. He talked to his mother-in-law who was a school social worker and a Loyola graduate. “She really inspired me to go the social work route,” he says.

So Zepeda switched gears. He applied for the Master of Social Work (MSW) program at Loyola and got in. That’s where he met Professor Maria Vidal de Haymes. “I was like, man, this professor’s cool. I want to be like her.” Vidal de Haymes noticed Zepeda’s interest in immigration and encouraged him to do a migration subspecialization. Then, during his internship for the MSW, he worked at Sullivan High School with a Chicago Public Schools social worker named Noe Torres. Torres’s specialty was grief, Zepeda says. “His presence was so calming in the middle of a crisis,” he says. “It was like watching a master at work.”

After graduation, Zepeda worked in the Evanston Public Schools but eventually turned his eye back to a PhD program. He applied to Loyola’s PhD in Social Work and got in. “I was so excited,” he says. But then, that very summer, he got a phone call.

“It was June 20, World Refugee Day,” he says. Sullivan High School called to say they were considering him for a new position as a refugee social worker. He had just said yes to the PhD program at Loyola, but here was a chance to work directly with the population he cared so much about.

He said yes to Sullivan, too, and for one week he did both the PhD program and the full-time job. He quickly realized it was untenable and he needed to make a choice.

“The thought in my head was, ‘Josh, these kids need you. Not just half of you. All of you.’” So he said goodbye to the PhD and devoted himself to the kids at Sullivan. “Some days it’s so chaotic here,” he says. “I think ‘Why did I quit? I could be Dr. Zepeda now.’” But then there’s the other side of the coin. “The best part of being here is watching kids grow,” he says. That and the joy on their faces when they get to sing and dance.

With an hour left until the assembly—officially celebrating Middle Eastern, North African, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander students—final rehearsals were underway in the auditorium. Sisters from Sudan marked their dance. A girl with curlers in her hair practiced her song. Another student recited a poem in Arabic.

Then it was time to practice the flag parade. Zepeda had bought flags to represent each of the students’ home countries and had passed them out, one for each kid. They lined up and processed to the stage, where one by one they paused in the spotlight to hold up their flag. They ran through the procession twice, and then Zepeda took the microphone.

“Listen,” he said, “I want you to hear these words, and I want them to hit your heart. This is your moment. When you hold up your flag, I want you to know that we see you and you’re home.”

Zepeda put down the mic and got into his costume. He hadn’t been planning on performing, he says, but a group of girls asked him to participate in a Bollywood dance.

When rehearsal finished, Zepeda and his co-organizer Katelyn Lawrence called the rest of the high school to join them in the auditorium. The audience quickly filled, and students chatted in many languages.

The lights went down, and the performance opened with the flag parade. Each time a student held up their flag, the audience erupted. At the end of the Bollywood dance, Zepeda threw confetti into the air. The girl from Afghanistan spun so fast her red dress was a blur on stage. The rest of the performances went smoothly and soon the show was over, as was the school day. The students filed out of the auditorium and into the community.

A few days later, Zepeda watched the recording of the performance. He has been doing these assemblies for a few years and this was the first time he wasn’t sure it was all going to come together. His job is tough and he tries to balance extra projects like the assembly and soccer coaching. Sometimes he thinks he may still like to get that PhD at Loyola one day. “If they’ll have me back, maybe at another point in my career,” he says. But for now, he is happy to see the joy on his students’ faces.

The recording of his students performing the flag parade made him emotional for two reasons, he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, I hope you feel at home. This is your home and we honor you, we respect you, we acknowledge where you’re from.’ That’s the big emotion,” he says. “The other emotion was like, ‘God dammit, we did it.’”

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