During the national search for the next president of St. John’s College High School in Washington, D.C., the search committee considered leaders in education, government, military, business and non-profit sectors. Kevin M. Haley, who was appointed as St. John’s new president and began serving in that role on July 1, 2024, had served as a leader in varied professional environments, including experience in government, private and public companies, philanthropic and for-profit board work and as the chief strategy officer for Under Armour.
Haley also brought another experience to his work leading St. John’s College High School. He and his wife Kathleen are the parents of six children, including two St. John’s graduates, their sons T.J. (class of 2020) and Mac (class of 2022), and two current students at St. John’s, their son Charlie who is now a 12th grader there, and their daughter Mollie, a 10th grader.
Before his children began attending St. John’s, Haley said he was familiar with the school through uncles and cousins who went there, taught there and coached there.
“I had enormous respect for the school, but I hadn’t seen it directly. And when my boys were here, I was just blown away by the experience they had, the teachers they had,” he said, and then he emphasized the impact of St. John’s students from diverse backgrounds, from urban, suburban and rural communities, and with different talents, learning together.
“Based on my experience with my sons at St. John’s, I was just incredibly impressed by what they’ve built here, what it does for students, both inside and outside the classroom,” Kevin Haley said in an interview.
St. John’s College High School, which was founded in 1851 in the nation’s capital and will mark its 175th anniversary in 2026, is a coeducational Catholic high school and is the second oldest De La Salle Christian Brothers school in the United States.
St. John’s College High School has a current enrollment of 1,285 students, who come to the school from all parts of Washington, D.C., and the nearby Maryland suburbs, and from as far away as Woodbridge and Great Falls in Virginia and from Southern Maryland and from north of Baltimore. Its academic program includes the De La Salle Scholars Program for the highest achieving students, its mainstream course offerings, and the Benilde Program, a college prep program for high school students with diagnosed mild learning differences.
Reflecting on the diversity of St. John’s students, Haley said, “Those kids bring with them just a wealth of different experiences, different upbringings. And as a result, they learn from each other, as much in the cafeteria, in the choir or in the band room, or on the athletic field or court, as they do directly from their teachers and coaches. That only happens if you’re bringing in exceptional kids from all different backgrounds, where they’re being exposed to something they’ve never been exposed to before.”
The new president of St. John’s College High School added, “Being part of that is an honor and a privilege for me.”
As he began his work there, Haley noted, “There’s a great community around St. John’s that feels passionately about the mission, because they’ve seen it, and they see how the kids love the school, and how they thrive.”
Asked what the legacy of the De La Salle Christian Brothers meant to him, Haley responded, “It means everything.”
St. John Baptist de La Salle, who founded the Christian Brothers in 1680, is the patron saint of Catholic school teachers. Today, 5,000 De La Salle Christian Brothers teach more than 900,000 students in 77 countries.
Haley noted how the order from the beginning taught children from different backgrounds, and how St. John Baptist de La Salle decided they would do that as religious brothers, not as priests. “That was intentional… they wanted to appear more like a family member… because learning involves building a relationship and trust with your teacher,” he said.
In addition to religion classes, school Masses and times for prayer, St. John’s students participate in retreats, do 90 hours of Christian service, make service immersion trips and offer peer ministry to fellow students.
St. John’s, Haley said, is “a warm and welcoming community where we’re going to open our arms and cast a really wide net and stay true to this mission of educating students across socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. That does date back hundreds of years, and that’s something that we’re proud to continue and proud to be a part of.”
Haley, a native Washingtonian, attended Holy Cross School in Garrett Park and then graduated from St. Jane de Chantal School in Bethesda and Georgetown Preparatory School in North Bethesda, where he played football and ran indoor and outdoor track. He still keeps in touch with Prep classmates and teammates who have remained lifelong friends.
Asked how his Catholic education shaped him, Haley said, “Anytime you look at education, especially those formative years, when so much change is going on in your brain, physically, mentally, spiritually, the people you’re around obviously have a profound impact on you. I was very fortunate to have an amazing class, classmates, teammates, as well as amazing coaches and teachers.”
After attending Catholic elementary and high school, Kevin Haley graduated from Princeton University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where he met his wife Kathleen. They have been married 27 years. Over the years, Kathleen has worked as an attorney and as an elementary school teacher. Their oldest child, Maggie Haley, graduated from Southern High School in Harwood, Maryland, and after graduating from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, she works for a company in the Boston area. T.J. Haley recently graduated from Georgetown University and is coaching lacrosse at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Mac Haley is in his third year at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In addition to the Haleys’ son Charlie and their daughter Mollie who are attending St. John’s, their daughter Grace is an eighth grader at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C.
Kevin Haley’s grandfather, Pete Haley, helped found the Catholic Youth Organization in the Archdiocese of Washington in 1945. Kevin Haley played CYO basketball and competed in CYO track, first at Holy Cross Parish, and then at St. Jane de Chantal.
“Playing CYO sports, you get a sense for the sacrifice made by the coaches, they’re typically volunteer coaches who have full-time jobs, and kids and families to raise,” Haley said. “I remember my dad (Patrick Haley Sr.) coached us in track. My Uncle John coached the St. Elizabeth’s team. My dad also coached my sister Mary Sue’s basketball team. It’s an enormous time sacrifice, all those practices, all those games. And I think that’s a great role model type of experience for a kid, to see an adult giving back to the community, giving back to the next generation, and teaching while coaching… I certainly remember all the hills that my dad used to make us run in track practice.”
Haley remembers how in CYO track practice, another coach would run with the youth from Holy Cross Parish through parks to the Mormon Temple and back.
“That’s a long run, it’s like seven miles, for little grade school kids… My dad would drive a Suburban and pick up any stragglers who couldn’t make it. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn things like resilience and grit, and you don’t want to quit, but everything in your body, your legs and your heart and your lungs, is telling you to quit. I think that’s a unique opportunity for kids,” Haley said, adding, “Those lessons, I think, become important when you go to college and you need to study for an exam, and you feel like you’re too tired, or (when) you grow up, you get a job, get married and have kids, and you’re not getting any sleep because the kids are up, the baby’s colicky, whatever it is, and you literally feel like I can’t do this. But you learned long ago, right when you were 6, 7, 8, 9 years old, that it just feels like you can’t do it. So I think those lessons of resilience and grit that you learned playing CYO basketball or whatever it is, they go well beyond just sportsmanship or the X’s and O’s of a sport.”
As St. John’s new president, Kevin Haley succeeded Jeff Mancabelli, who served as an assistant principal for academic affairs at St. John’s in 1999, became its first lay principal in 2001 and its first lay president in 2010. Under Mancabelli’s leadership, St. John’s greatly expanded its academic programming and campus facilities. Beginning on July 1, Mancabelli began serving as the Head of School at the Collegiate School, a coeducational and independent day school in Richmond, Virginia.
Reflecting on how his varied professional experiences will help him in leading St. John’s College High School, Kevin Haley said, “I’ve been blessed with a very circuitous career path, and that’s allowed me to learn from people with incredibly diverse backgrounds” and different styles of leadership.
He added, “I’ve seen a lot of different management styles at the top and also down through an organization. So hopefully, I bring the best of that to St. John’s… Hopefully that’s taught me when to get out of people’s way, when to empower people to do their job, to be at their best, in what I consider a servant leader model. My job is not to teach the students. My job is to support the people who teach the students, and that involves a lot of different things that I get to take off of their plate, so the teachers don’t have to worry about fundraising” or things like the work being done on the school’s buildings.
Haley likened his short-term approach to the credo of the Hippocratic Oath, to “first do no harm.”
“St. John’s is in a very positive, very strong position in terms of the students, the teachers and the demand for the school,” he said. “Anytime you work with or among a group of people, a group of stakeholders, who are passionate about a mission, great things happen. That’s what’s happening at St. John’s right now.”
The new president of St. John’s College High School hopes to work on a long-term strategic plan that incorporates plans for all the units there, and work on the next phase of master planning for the school, while continuing to foster support for St. John’s.
“In many ways, I look at my job as not a job, but as stewardship, part of this incredible community that has an amazing history dating back, as part of the Lasallian mission, hundreds of years, and then soon to be 175 years as St. John’s College High School,” Haley said. “So really I think the opportunity is to stay true to that mission, and set the community up for the next 175 years, so St. John’s can continue on its mission.”
