An Opportunity

Marlon Henriquez ’15 embodies the idea of paying it forward. As a Chicago public school principal, he’s using his life-changing education to provide the same to others.

Marlon Henriquez ’15

Marlon and his family immigrated to Marshalltown, Iowa, as refugees from El Salvador when Marlon was three. At four, his family moved to Postville, Iowa, where about a third of the population was Hispanic. At 13, they moved to Decorah, where Marlon remembers being one of about three Hispanic families at Decorah High School. Along with the move, Marlon had to navigate school systems that supported immigrant families in different ways.

Around the time he thought about applying to college, he says, “I started to realize how many barriers were in the way for me as an immigrant, as a first-generation high school student, first-generation college student, and everything else. I realized pretty quickly I didn’t qualify for FAFSA and many kinds of student loans. It caused me to unpack my identity as a Dreamer a little bit more. It was a really rough wake-up call.”

One evening in spring 2011, Marlon made his way to Loyalty Hall on Luther’s campus to talk to Sherry (Braun) Alcock ’82, executive director of alumni relations (now retired) and the mother of his then girlfriend and now wife, Emily (Alcock) Henriquez ’17, about taking Emily to prom. Sherry asked about Marlon’s college plans, and he ended up sharing his dilemma. She encouraged him to apply to Luther, and her compassionate intervention set him on a steeply upward trajectory.

As principal at a Chicago public elementary school, Marlon Henriquez ’15 and his staff have facilitated student trips to go camping, on overnights at museums, and to see the full solar eclipse. Among many other outings, they've taken students to the Rocky Mountains; Washington, D.C; and a farm in Vermont (pictured here).

At Luther, Marlon didn’t deliberate over his major: “I recognized how much impact even a high school education was making on my ability to feel empowered and to have a voice. And I also recognized that my parents didn’t get that—they were deprived of an education. So when I had a chance, I knew that I needed to be a teacher.”

Marlon wanted to work with English learners, and a student-teaching experience in Chicago drew him and Emily to move there in 2017. His rise since arriving might best be described as meteoric. The National Center for Education Statistics puts the average age of a school principal at 49. Marlon became principal of Frank W. Gunsaulus Scholastic Academy, a public elementary school in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, at just 30 years old.

Eighty-eight percent of kids at Gunsaulus are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and 47 percent are English learners. Last year, the school went on soft lockdown seven times because of things happening in the neighborhood. Housing insecurity comes up among Gunsaulus families, as does uncertainty around legal rights in this political climate.

Yet in its network of 27 schools, Gunsaulus is second in attendance, second in math, and fourth in reading. Students from its eighth-grade graduating class this year got into some of the most competitive high schools in the city. One was even admitted to a top-five high school in the country.

Gunsaulus’s mission is to develop students who feel empowered as leaders, learners, and global citizens, and Marlon and his staff work tirelessly to give students an education that broadens their horizons. Aggressive fundraising and budgeting among staff and families has allowed students to travel to Washington, D.C., camp in the Rocky Mountains, spend time on a farm in Vermont, and take overnight field trips to museums.

Marlon Henriquez '15, who wasn't able to study abroad as a Luther student, recently took his elementary school students on a cultural exchange to South Korea.

Because of his legal status at the time, Marlon wasn’t able to study abroad as a Luther student, but he feels like things came full circle this spring, when he led the second trip of Gunsaulus students to South Korea on an exchange program.

“I just sit here and think about how the world has perceived students who look like our students, who look like me, as less than or not capable,” he says. “Just give somebody one opportunity and you never know what might become of it or what they might be able to achieve.”

To learn more about Marlon’s elementary school, visit gunsaulus.org.