Retiring Vogelweid Learning Center director sees special education moving in the right direction
Paula Wekenborg is deliberate about the way she refers to students in special education programs.
She goes out of her way not to say “they.”
“You don’t exclude kids, you don’t isolate students,” insisted Mrs. Wekenborg, who’s been director of the Vogelweid Learning Center at St. Peter School in Jefferson City for 19 years.
“All students are here to learn,” she said. “Their parents send them to a Catholic school to be in a religious environment and be closer to Christ. That’s what it’s all about.”
Mrs. Wekenborg will retire on July 31, to be succeeded by Theresa Atkins, who’s been teaching at Vogelweid for almost two decades.
“I feel good about Theresa taking over,” said Mrs. Wekenborg. “She’s so familiar with the program. I feel confident that the vision will keep moving forward.”
Vogelweid Learning Center, established at St. Peter School in 1964, has always been a pioneer in Catholic special education.
“I’ve always said, I inherited the vision of Vogelweid,” said Mrs. Wekenborg. “I was the caretaker.”
She also helped build it up.
“As a director, I didn’t have much day-to-day impact as far as in the classroom, as far as teaching,” she said. “But I think most kids saw me as someone they could come and talk to, that they trusted, that they knew I was looking out for them, not just when they were in class.”
The program expanded to Helias Catholic High School in Jefferson City this past year, with support from the diocese’s SPIRE program (diojeffcity.org/special-learning-opportunities).
SPIRE was established in 2015 and reinvigorated in 2023 to promote special education in Catholic schools.
The first phase was the Helias Catholic partnership, which Erin Vader Ed.D., diocesan superintendent of Catholic schools, helped bring about.
The goal is to allow children with a broad range of needs and learning differences to receive a seamless Catholic education from kindergarten through their senior year.
“We started out small,” said Mrs. Wekenborg. “We quickly learned that there’s a world of difference between elementary and high school.”
Three Helias Catholic students were enrolled in the program this year.
Elizabeth Twyman, director of Helias’s Pope John Paul II Student Success Center, gave valuable direction on how the school works and what credits each student needs to complete in order to graduate.
Vogelweid provides “the next layer” of support beyond the Student Success Center.
“We’ve worked very well together,” Mrs. Wekenborg stated. “When you walk in there, you’re a Helias Catholic student, first and foremost. The school’s motto is ‘building a community of saints and scholars for Christ.’ Every student has different needs in order to reach that goal.”
Just like at St. Peter, Vogelweid at Helias Catholic will adapt from year-to-year — “different students coming in, different levels of need.”
Mrs. Wekenborg anticipates growth of the program at Helias and the eventual need for additional staff.
“It kind of ripples out,” she said.
Where to begin
Mrs. Wekenborg began teaching at Vogelweid in 1996 and became director in 2006.
While she was in junior high at St. Peter, her aunt became the leader for the Girl Scout troop at Vogelweid.
The aunt asked young Paula to help.
“Vogelweid was always there, but I didn’t know any of the kids,” Mrs. Wekenborg recalled. “At that time, they were in their separate building, self-contained.”
Mrs. Wekenborg quickly found out that the girls there were like most of the other girls she knew: “They joked around and laughed at a lot of things and liked to have fun.”
Those encounters set her on the course to becoming a teacher with an emphasis in special education.
The Vogelweid Learning Center began in the early 1960s, when several St. Peter Parish families urged longtime pastor Monsignor Joseph Vogelweid to set up a special education program at St. Peter School.
They were adamant about providing a Catholic education to their children with disabilities.
Money in the parish and school was very tight at that time. Some school board members were concerned about taking on any additional responsibilities. But Msgr. Vogelweid did convince the board and the rest of the parish that they needed to and could welcome children with special needs.
He and a fellow priest from St. Louis recruited Sister Adele (formerly Sister Matthew Marie) Hulling, a School Sister of Notre Dame who had studied at two schools of special education, to be the first special education administrator and teacher.
The St. Peter Special Education Program opened on Sept. 9, 1964, with 15 students.
Since then, the program, renamed the Vogelweid Learning Center in 1984, has grown to become an integral part of every subject and every grade level of St. Peter School.
It now functions as a special services program for children of widely diverse learning needs. The variety and depth of these services — coupled with the level of integration with the rest of the students of St. Peter School and the collaboration among all the teachers — makes the Vogelweid Learning Center genuinely unique.
Students throughout the school interact effortlessly with classmates who have special needs, because they’ve been doing so since kindergarten.
Tighter bonds
Mrs. Wekenborg believes it would be immensely helpful if every educator were certified in special ed.
“It’s great to have the desire to serve the children you’re entrusted to teach, but it’s just as essential to have the training that allows you to be effective at it,” she stated.
“The profile of the learner is so different now,” she said. “I read a study fairly recently that said even in Catholic schools, 50 percent of the students in the classroom have some kind of impact to their learning.
Part of the mindset of special education is not to pigeonhole students into categories.
“But I do think all educators now see that there are kids who have all levels of emotional and skill development, and you need to give them what you can as they go down their path.”
Mrs. Wekenborg said the largest change she’s seen over the years is that the students who use Vogelweid’s services are much more integrated into the whole school.
“Now more than ever, kids come into school with so many different levels of prior knowledge, experience, levels of skills,” she stated.
She pointed to studies that show the benefits of an integrated learning environment, both for students in special education and for typical learners.
“Data shows that when you have mixed classrooms, all students achieve higher than if they were heavily segregated one way or another,” she said.
“Such as these”
Mrs. Wekenborg always said she’d know when it was time to retire.
She stayed on to help get the SPIRE fund reestablished and help oversee the expansion of Vogelweid to Helias Catholic.
Now, she’s ready to be more flexible with her time, which includes spending time with her grandchildren.
She always kept a sign containing Jesus’s words in Luke 18:16 in her office, where she can always see it: “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
“Every morning, I pray the same prayer,” she said. “‘God, please be with me today. Help me make the decisions I make.’”
At night, before bed, she prays, “Yes, you were with me today. And you’ll be with me tomorrow, and as always, I’m not going to be alone in it.”
She said she’ll miss the students the most, along with the lifelong friends she’s made among the St. Peter School staff.
“I always had morning duty at St. Peter,” she said. “Being out there every day and seeing almost every student who walks into the building — I’m going to miss that very much.”
She reveres the legacy of the families who worked with Msgr. Vogelweid and Sr. Adele to bring special education to St. Peter.
Mrs. Wekenborg also credits the parish for sustaining it.
“It’s costly,” she noted. “There were times when administrators had to make tough decisions about making sure the money was there.”
The same goes for pastors.
“They could have made decisions that impacted Vogelweid negatively,” she said. “They never did.”
Good foundation
As she steps down from her post, Mrs. Wekenborg asked for prayers for the same Lord who has guided her, to continue doing the same for her successors.
She also prays for all the students at St. Peter to continue to be kind and open to each other.
“I think everything else just takes care of itself from there,” she said.
She’s confident that the SPIRE fund will continue to grow and move toward fulfilling all of its objectives.
“First of all, enlightening the awareness of the diversity of student needs across the board in any school in the diocese,” she stated. “Second, the money aspect. Fundraising. Making sure that they have what is needed to serve all students.”
Hopefully, all 36 Catholic schools in the diocese will be able to apply for grants from the SPIRE fund.
This would allow each school to identify its own needs for special education, and then develop its own programs or systems of support.
“It’s going to look different in every school, based on their size and their needs,” Mrs. Wekenborg noted.
She said it is essential to have schools that are both truly Catholic and truly inclusive.
“Jesus was the first inclusive teacher!” she stated. “Aren’t we called to follow his example? Isn’t that part of the Catholic social justice we’re all called to uphold?”
