Investing in the next generation

On a Wednesday afternoon in “Ms. Jay’s” classroom, each fourth-grader sat on a round dot on the carpet, folded their legs criss-cross-applesauce, sat up tall and readied their hands in their lap.

Music teacher Jaylin Shelton clapped a simple rhythm — pat-clap-pat-clap — then asked the students to repeat it back. “When we clap or pat, what is that called?” she asked.

“A beat!” several students replied.

As a first-year teacher at St. Louis Catholic Academy, Jaylin has found a love for sharing music with grade school students — even though that wasn’t always her plan.

She earned her bachelor’s degree from Chicago State University, then started a master’s degree in music at Northwestern University, aiming for a career as a professional singer. But when some health complications prompted her to move back home to St. Louis, she pivoted to a different opportunity: teaching.

At St. Louis Catholic Academy, Jaylin teaches all 192 students in grades K-8. Each grade has music class two to three times per week, giving them ample time to learn rhythm, solfège — do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do — and lots and lots of songs. She draws on her college and graduate school research on the importance of music education for children.

“Music activates a different part of our brain that allows us to process and memorize things better,” she said. “And when you implement music at a young age, it’s scientifically proven to help build these core foundations in childhood development.”

Jaylin grew up in the north St. Louis area and attended archdiocesan Cardinal Ritter College Prep, which is less than two miles from St. Louis Catholic Academy’s new campus on North Jefferson Avenue. The Annual Catholic Appeal supports both schools.

Cardinal Ritter shaped her through both academic excellence and the strong sense of community, imparting on her that “I’m not just a student — I’m a member of a community, and it’s my duty to fulfill and enrich the community that I’m a part of,” she said. “And going to a Catholic school really helped shape my faith formation.”

It also helped foster her love of music. During a meeting of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians in St. Louis, she was chosen alongside several other archdiocesan high school students to perform a small concert. Horst Buchholz, then-director of sacred music at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, directed the group and afterward asked Jaylin to join the cathedral choir.

“That’s really what shaped my foundation in wanting to pursue music professionally,” she said.

Across the St. Louis Catholic Academy building, fifth-grade teacher Ashley Marshall walked among desk pods in her classroom, stopping to answer questions as her students worked quietly through math word problems.

Ashley, a fellow Cardinal Ritter College Prep alumna, is also in her first year at the academy. After teaching for three years in Houston, she heard about St. Louis Catholic Academy’s new campus and new leadership team and decided she wanted to return to the north St. Louis area that was integral to her formation.

“When I went to Cardinal Ritter, it’s like they saw beyond the surface … it was the sense of being fully seen. They invested in the holistic being versus, I just need you to get this data for this next step for our school,” she said. “And that’s the main reason I wanted to come back, because I wanted to do the same thing for other students, too.”

After high school, she attended Xavier University in New Orleans intending to then go on to medical school. But she started a homework clinic for K-8 students in the neighboring schools and found her heart pulled in a different direction.

“A lot of them just wanted that one-on-one attention, and some of them did have homework that they actually needed help with,” she said. “And so when I realized that it was fulfilling for me, I said, ‘OK, I could actually do this.’”

At St. Louis Catholic Academy, Ashley appreciates the collaborative approach among the faculty and administration, inviting each person to share ideas and use their gifts and talents to lift up the community, she said. Next year, for example, she’s hoping to start a volleyball team at the school — another thing she loved at Cardinal Ritter.

“I see myself in a lot of the students that I serve, and I also see how they could benefit from the same investment that the people at Cardinal Ritter had in me,” she said. “They’re in the same shoes, or the same seats, that I used to be in, and it just takes one person to see you and invest in you and invest in your growth for you to take off and be self-sufficient beyond these doors, beyond these walls.”