Willamette Academy Annual Report - Academic Year 2021-22

When you visit Willamette Academy, you’ll notice a wall with two rows of almost perfectly aligned picture frames. As you move through each frame you’ll get a flashback to early 2000’s fashion, awkward smiles, and the introduction of our famous burgundy Academy blazers. Each frame captures another graduating class of Academy students.

As a graduate from the Academy, I often find myself in the hallway looking through each class photo. Many were my role models, peers, and friends or, for the most recent classes, my students. Behind each photo there are many things unseen: the time and commitment over five years, summer camps, workshops, Saturday sessions, mentor meetings, parent sessions and a lot of community building activities.

Since 2001, we’ve seen hundreds of applications from seventh-graders across the Salem-Keizer School District. Each year, about 32 students say “yes” to Willamette Academy and entrust us to do what we do best — to support students and their families with resources and guidance on their path toward higher education and to develop leaders.

Over the last 20 years, the Academy has grown greatly. We have moved to a centralized location on campus with sufficient space for all our activities, we’ve strengthened our mentorship and programmatic curriculum, restructured our parent sessions, and further integrated ourselves into the community at Willamette University.

In preparation for our 20th anniversary celebration, we created a video where we interviewed alumni from the first graduating classes. Many of them spoke to the resources, mentorship, information and support they received through the Academy. However, the biggest theme was around community — a community with shared goals, one where all voices matter, and where one could step into leadership. In re-watching the video, I was reminded of Maya Angelou’s quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

It is with this sentiment that I want to thank everyone who has been involved with the Academy over the last 20 years. Our goal is to get students to college and each of you share with us in that success. Most importantly, you have allowed our students to feel seen as individuals worth being invested in. Getting to college is one thing, but having a community that is rooting for you is priceless.

With gratitude,

Delia Olmos-García ’14 Executive Director