Change Has Been Constant in Mike D’Angelo’s Life and Career
Port Charlotte, FL – Change. Long before the sixth century B.C. when Greek philosopher Heraclitus opined that the only constant in life is change, change has been one of the few things all humans could count on.
Figuring out how to create, inspire and manage change has at the same time, perplexed educators, leaders and forward thinkers throughout time. To affect positive change requires effort, resilience, planning and support according to modern neuropsychologist and author Theo Tsaousides.
Pinnacle Charter Schools founder and CEO Mike D’Angelo understands the difficulty of bringing about change as much as anyone. He has been working to change the way we, as a society, think about educating our kids for most of his almost 50 years as a teacher, coach and school administrator.
He has certainly put in the effort to bring about change and has shown plenty of resilience to bounce back from setbacks time and again. He has also done the planning and continues to think about better ways to do things in education. His biggest hurdle has been in getting the support for his ideas, despite the fact his ideas have proven to be overwhelmingly successful in practical application.
“I have spent my whole life being criticized in newspapers for trying to do the kinds of things we are doing now at our schools,” D’Angelo said.
The D’Angelo story starts in rural Wisconsin, Janesville to be exact, near the Illinois border, where he was primarily raised with a brother by his maternal grandfather, with his mother involved at intervals.
“I am from one of the original broken homes because my mom and dad got divorced when I was about a year old,” D’Angelo said. “We moved around a lot when I was a kid, because my mom was running from my dad, so we moved a lot, and I never had any aspirations of going to college.
“My mom was into horses and my brother, Steve and I rode and broke horses, and I thought that is what I would always do. I thought I would become a farrier.”
Before he even got out of elementary school, D’Angelo said he was held back a grade, not because he failed, but because his teacher simply didn’t think he was ready for the next level.
“That extra year changed the trajectory of my entire life,” D’Angelo said. “I went from the youngest kid in my class, to the oldest overnight. I was always very self-conscious about being held back because I didn’t want people to think I was stupid. I was just a young kid who was smaller than everyone else.”
His kept his focus at school on learning the trade he saw as his future, basically because he was making as much money as his mom by showing and shoeing horses, but by the time he reached junior high school, he had also found a passion for athletics.
“I played everything,” D’Angelo said. “From swimming to baseball, basketball, track and football. I even went to the high school rodeo and rode bulls and all that stuff.”
He was still much smaller that his classmates physically, weighing in at just 115 pounds, as compared to his older brother’s 190 pounds. He also didn’t care much for school and, after turning 16, he quit a couple of times. The school and coaches always found him and brought him back.
“I really didn’t want to play football because I didn’t want to get hit,” D’Angelo said. “I got a reputation for being hard to tackle because I was so small, and scared. The older guys took care of me a little bit because I was small but, by the time I was a junior or senior, I was up to about 170 pounds. I got faster and was a decent football player, but I wasn’t any kind of all-star or anything, just good.”
He never thought about college, and never took any college classes. In fact, he was in some remedial classes in high school.
“I’m not proud of it, but I had never read a book,” D’Angelo said. “When I was a senior, I was always sneaking off the school grounds to go bowling or something else. I would then come back at the end of the day to go to practice.”
By his senior year, he was one of the biggest players on the football team, at just 170 pounds. That meant he didn’t have nearly as much success as he did on the track team as a hurdler and pole vaulter.
Even though he and his team at Orfordville High didn’t excel, her received an invitation to a recruiting weekend at Northern Illinois University, just across the state line in DeKalb, IL.
“I didn’t want to go to college,” D’Angelo said. “My brother had gone to college for one semester and dropped out and my mom told me she wasn’t going to spend one penny on me to go down there. But I went down and basically tried out. We spent some time in the gym with basketball, but then we went out to the track, and I was pole-vaulting and hurdling.”
Before returning home, NIU offered him a football scholarship, not to play football, but to be on the track team and play basketball.
“When I got home, my mom was mad because it was going to be a waste of money, and my dad said they were throwing away a scholarship,” D’Angelo said. “They were probably right.
Even my guidance counselor told me it was a big waste of money for me to go because I wasn’t ready to go to college.”
By the time he arrived at NIU, he had filled out to 205 pounds, and he was back on the football field as a running back. But he found lot of turmoil at NIU, both at the school and within the football program.
“It was a bad time at NIU, but it was a good experience for me because it got me focused on the classroom,” D’Angelo said. “I was struggling academically, but I was working hard to get better. I failed a speech class twice because I couldn’t get up and speak in front of a class.”
It was his grandfather who helped him see the light and motivated him to work harder on his academics. With his grandfather’s health failing because of diabetes, D’Angelo was determined to get through college and graduate in time for his grandfather to see it.
“He told me, when I was really struggling, that I had a choice to make,” D’Angelo said. “He said I had to decide if I wanted to spend my life working with my back or working with my head.”
Working with his head was much preferable than the alternative.
He transferred to Milton College after his second year at NIU where a local auto dealership that supported the football program provided him with room and board. The smaller setting at the Division III school proved to be a much better atmosphere, especially academically.
“My advisor was the President of the college,” D’Angelo said. “That was just how small the school was.”
At NIU he had been studying to become a city manager or a city planner, and once he got to Milton, he was going to get a degree in Economics and Political Science. He served as an intern in the City Manager’s office back in Janesville and realized quickly it was not what he wanted to do.
“I went to my advisor, the president, and told him working as a city manager was not what I wanted to do,” D’Angelo said. “He asked what it was that I wanted to do, and I told him ‘I want to coach!’”
To get into coaching, D’Angelo had to completely change what he was doing academically. To avoid having to spend an extra year, or even two, in college, he loaded his schedule for that final year.
“I took 28 credit hours during the fall semester, while also playing football, and 36 in the spring,” D’Angelo said. “I had to get special dispensation from the president to do it. They walked me through everything, and my wife was with me all the way, and I got through it. I never thought I could do anything like that but is amazing what you can do when you are properly motivated.
“The best part was that I didn’t have to spend a lot of time sitting in a classroom listening to a professor. I had a lot of things that I had to do, and because it was a smaller school, they had the flexibility to work with me to make sure I got everything done.”
At that point, the thought of smaller schools with more personal attention began to formulate. The fully formed plan that launched Pinnacle many years later was still far in the future.
Coaching Opened Doors to Being an Educator
After finishing college, D’Angelo started looking for coaching jobs, but not just any coaching job would do. He wanted to be a head coach, and he wanted to coach basketball.
“I was terrible as a basketball coach, but I had such bad experiences with football that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get kids involved in it,” D’Angelo said. “I applied at a bunch of small high schools, and I finally got a call back from Kickapoo High for an interview.”
Kickapoo High, located in Viola, WI, was part of a three-day trip across the state interviewing for jobs. By the time he got home, he had a message from the principal, John Young, at Kickapoo wanting him to come back to talk more.
Ultimately, he was offered the job of head basketball coach, but on one condition – he also had to coach the football team.
“I was only 23 years old at the time and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do it,” D’Angelo said. “I had to be the head football coach if I wanted the head basketball job and the teaching position. So, with my degree in economics and political science, I moved there to coach football and basketball.”
Kickapoo, which is about 50 miles southeast of La Crosse in the middle of nowhere among tobacco fields and, even today, has just 268 students in grades 6-12. Teachers and coaches had to wear a lot of hats to make things work.
D’Angelo found out how challenging that could be when he was told he would be teaching Oriental culture and history, a topic he knew absolutely nothing about. So, in addition to learning how to be a coach in two sports, he had to teach a subject he knew nothing about.
“I got this job in August, and we started football the day I got there,” D’Angelo said. “All I had was a little pamphlet on Oriental Culture and History, and it was a fiasco, but all of these things taught me so much about myself and about kids, it gave me so many different skills that were amazing.”
D’Angelo remained at tiny Kickapoo for four-and-a-half years where he learned much more than he ever had, including that he was not a basketball coach. He moved on to Laconia High, which is on the eastern side of Wisconsin near Lake Winnebago. Compared to Kickapoo it was a giant school, with about 600 students in grades 9-12.
“Most of the schools in Wisconsin back then were small,” D’Angelo said. “I think the average size was about 500 students. Now, they have consolidated a lot, but they have also figured out what I knew then, bigger isn’t necessarily better.”
He stayed at Laconia for two years – teaching, coaching football and coaching powerlifting, which was originally designed to help the football players get stronger but turned into more.
“Our powerlifting team got good really quickly,” D’Angelo said. “In fact, we won the state championship and received an invitation to go to Norman, Okla., to compete in the national championship.”
With no help from the school, D’Angelo rented an RV with his own money and took the team to Oklahoma over spring break. He was surprised and thrilled when the team earned a second-place finish and was excited to share that accomplishment with everyone back in Laconia.
“I went to the principal and all I asked was that we have an assembly to congratulate these kids on their accomplishment,” D’Angelo said. “I was stunned when he said no. He said the other teachers wouldn’t like it. I told him that if we didn’t have an assembly, I was out. So, I walked across the football field, collected my things and went home to tell my wife we were leaving.”
He decided then and there that he wanted to coach in college but to do so he needed to go back to school and get his master’s degree. So, he went to UW-Whitewater and got his master’s in a year, but his time in high school allowed him to understand that not all college instructors know what it is like to really teach kids.
“It was a constant battle in those classrooms trying to figure out how to teach kids things they needed to know, while not upsetting the principal or the school board,” D’Angelo said. “In athletics, when you work hard and become successful, people are either going to try to emulate you, or they are going to try to knock you back down to their level.
“I never thought the same thing would happen on the academic side, but it does. Too many people see the success of your school, and they spend their time and energy trying to bring you down, rather than focusing on doing things better at their own schools.”
That theme continues today for Pinnacle and its schools – Legion Collegiate Academy, Oceanside Collegiate Academy and Atlantic Collegiate Academy.
