As a student at Georgetown Preparatory School in North Bethesda, Jack Sullivan has continued his family’s legacy of serving young people with disabilities, while also running his own course as a champion cross country runner, as the drummer in a band, as a top student, and in helping to start a school outreach for refugees.
“My parents have focused a lot on setting an example of how to live,” he said of his mom and dad, Jennifer and Brian Sullivan.
Jack Sullivan – a member of the class of 2024 at Georgetown Prep – is the oldest of their five children, and their family members are parishioners at the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda. He earlier graduated from Mater Dei School in Bethesda, where his brother Brendan is now an eighth grader and his brother Patrick is a fifth grader. His sister Abby is a sophomore at Connelly School of the Holy Child in Potomac, and his sister Elizabeth is a seventh grader there.
In 2022, Jack Sullivan and his cousin Molly Tyson – a student at Connelly School of the Holy Child – were honored as Outstanding Youth Volunteers by Potomac Community Resources, Inc., a group that promotes inclusion of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities into all aspects of community life. Their grandparents, James and Joan Sullivan, founded PCR in 1994 with a group of other parents and with Msgr. John Enzler, then the pastor of Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Potomac. The advocacy of James and Joan Sullivan was inspired by their daughter Patricia, a young woman with significant developmental differences who couldn’t speak or walk, but whose spirit and love inspired her family and friends and was the spark for PCR’s beginning at Our Lady of Mercy.
Potomac Community Resources now provides 35 therapeutic, recreational, social and respite care programs serving more than 500 teens and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities throughout Montgomery County, Maryland.
“PCR has kind of been a constant throughout my life,” Jack Sullivan said. “…Going to a PCR event, even when I was younger, felt like a family get-together.”
The Prep student has volunteered with PCR’s speech therapy and music therapy programs. “The members are such great people. They’re enthusiastic and happy,” he said.
At PCR’s Patricia Sullivan Benefit Dinner where he was honored, Jack Sullivan joined his student band, 2% Milk, in performing for the guests. The band included lead singer and keyboard and piano player Patrick DuFour, guitarist Luke Shaffer and bassist Nick Arndt of Georgetown’s class of 2023, with Jack Sullivan playing the drums. The band was originally called Long Lost Cousins, and they started playing as fourth graders at Mater Dei School. Later the group renamed itself 2% Milk and played at dances at Georgetown Prep and some community events. The band’s repertoire includes classic rock and rock songs from the early 2000s.
“We all love music,” said Sullivan, who expressed hope that the band might reunite to play this summer when the three older members return from their first year of college.
Sullivan, who also plays in Georgetown Prep’s Jazz Band, said he likes playing the drums because “it sets the beat when you’re playing the drums. You can see how the structure of the song comes together.”
The Prep senior, who is one of the top students in his class, will be attending the California Institute of Technology this fall. He may major in mechanical engineering, and he is also interested in astrophysics.
His favorite classes at Prep have included Advanced Placement physics. “When I’m in physics class, I feel such wonder learning about how the world works,” he said. Engineering interests him, he added, because “you can take all the amazing things you learn about the world and apply that to helping people.”
At Georgetown Prep, Sullivan has competed in cross country, earning all-conference honors and finishing first in the Montgomery County Private School Championships the past two seasons. He noted what a great team sport that cross country is, with the runners supporting each other. He has also participated in track, competing in the 1600-meter and 3200-meter races.
“I’m a distance guy through and through,” he said, explaining why he likes distance running. “It’s very much a mental sport. You have to put in the work.”
He plans on running cross country and track for Caltech.
Another of his main activities at Georgetown Prep has been helping to found a Refugee Action Team at the school, spurred by an advocacy trip that he and students made to Capitol Hill that was sponsored by Jesuit Refugee Service. He learned about the more than 100 million people displaced around the world fleeing persecution, conflicts or other crises. The Refugee Action Team at Prep held a fundraiser for Ukrainian refugees after the Russian invasion of that country. The Prep students helped with a clothing and food drive sponsored by a program at Holy Trinity Parish in Georgetown that helps resettle refugees and migrants in the Washington area. The students had the chance to serve food, eat with and speak with refugees served by that parish. Those face-to-face encounters helped them understand the challenges that refugees have experienced, Sullivan said.
“Doing the direct service really demonstrates the humanity of refugees and migrants,” he said, adding that it reflects a central tenet of the Jesuit education he received at Georgetown Prep and the Catholic social teaching that he learned there. “It reaffirmed the feeling I had to live out the ideal of being a man for and with others.”
And the Georgetown Prep student who continued his family’s legacy of service while excelling in the classroom, in races and having fun with his band, said as his graduation approached, he was “just enjoying being with my friends.” A key thing he will take with him from his 12 years of Catholic education, he said, is “the importance of action in living out love of neighbor.”
