For over 170 years, Wheaton Academy has been sustained by leaders who understood that their role was not to build something new but to steward something sacred. Now, as Steve Bult completed two decades of faithful service, the Lord has provided the Academy’s 40th Head of School: Michael “Mike” Rogers. Unanimously selected by the Board of Trustees, Mike assumed leadership on August 1, bringing a conviction forged in prayer, strengthened in service, and anchored in an unwavering commitment to Christ-centered education.
“To lead Wheaton Academy is to steward a sacred trust,” Mike says. “Maintaining loyalty to Christ while preparing students to engage the world with courage and grace is absolutely a life’s calling. I believe with all my heart that God has called me to this place and to this work.”
That sense of calling did not arrive overnight. It grew and was strengthened over more than twenty-five years of educational leadership, in classrooms and on coaching fields, in the corridors of Wheaton Christian Grammar School, and in one of Chicago’s most underserved neighborhoods. It is grounded in a faith Mike traces to those who showed him what it means to surrender everything to Jesus and follow Him without reservation.
Rooted in Faith, Anchored by Family
Ask Mike Rogers about his life, and he will start with his family and his faith, because for him, they are inseparable. Mike and his wife, Linda, have built their life together in Wheaton. They raised six children, four daughters and two sons, and have watched each grow into a young adult who carries their own faith into the world. Four of their children graduated from Wheaton College, one from Hope College, and one from Emory University. Four were college swimmers, three at Wheaton and one at Emory, where he was part of a national championship team. Today, Mike and Linda are the proud grandparents of soon-to-be 13 grandchildren.
For more than twenty years, the Rogers family attended College Church in Wheaton, where former Pastor Kent Hughes played a particularly formative role in Mike’s walk with Christ. “Kent Hughes was enormously influential in my life,” Mike shares. Hughes’s book Disciplines of a Godly Man remains one of the volumes Mike returns to most often, a testament to the depth to which pastoral mentorship has shaped him. The family now worships at Christ Presbyterian Church in Wheaton. For Mike, faith is not an abstract commitment; it is a daily, lived-out surrender to God’s leading that has shaped every professional decision he has made and every season his family has walked through together.
When he is not leading a school, Mike stays active with running, biking, swimming, hunting, and fishing. He is a triathlete and a self-described “former” marathoner, though he admits he might have one more in him. His bookshelves tell their own story: Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken (a testament, Mike says, to God’s redemptive plan), Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, and C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters line the shelves alongside histories and adventure narratives. And if you want to find common ground quickly, ask him about the Iowa Hawkeyes or the Chicago Blackhawks.
Called and Equipped for Service
Mike’s career began where all great educators do: in the classroom. He taught and coached at Geneva High School before moving into instructional leadership at Naperville North High School, then stepped into the principal’s office at Wheaton Christian Grammar School, where he provided spiritual and academic leadership for 530 students. There, he designed a professional growth and evaluation plan for teachers, launched a full-day kindergarten program, and played a key role in a $25 million campus expansion and capital campaign.
But it was his next chapter that would define his passion for service. In 2013, Mike looked at the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, a community with some of the city’s highest rates of violence and poverty and felt God calling him to build something that did not yet exist: a school that could change the trajectory of children’s lives.
“I chose to start a charter school in the most violent neighborhood of Chicago,” Mike says, “to provide students and families with a better education, better after-school programming, and a greater chance of success in life. As people have literally been gunned down at our doorstep, we have not wavered in the battle to fulfill our mission.”
Starting with a vision and a blank piece of paper, Mike created the comprehensive design for Moving Everest Charter School, secured the charter, and personally recruited every teacher and staff member. The doors opened in August 2015 with kindergarten and first grade, serving 180 students. Over the next decade, the school grew to serve more than 750 students in grades K through 8, with 135 staff members and a budget exceeding $14 million. Three graduating classes have gone on to attend some of Chicago’s best high schools and even elite boarding schools beyond the city.
The experience of building Moving Everest from nothing taught Mike lessons that no textbook could. He learned how to cast a God-sized vision and then do the painstaking, prayerful work of making it real. He learned how to hire for mission alignment, how to raise more than $4 million without a development department, how to partner with a board that governs strategically and empowers its leader to execute, and perhaps most importantly, how to hold firm to mission when the pressure to compromise is relentless. “Just as Nehemiah rebuilt the wall despite opposition,” Mike reflects, “we learned that faithfulness to God’s calling requires both courage and perseverance.” Everything he built in Chicago, the vision-casting, the culture-setting, the mission-holding under pressure, he now carries into the halls of Wheaton Academy.
A Vision for Wheaton Academy’s Future
Mike comes to Wheaton Academy with a clear understanding of the school’s extraordinary strengths and the cultural moment in which it operates. Drawing on the Parable of the Sower, he sees a growing movement of families hungry for Christ-centered education, and he believes Wheaton Academy is uniquely positioned to be what he calls a “good soil” school, a place where mission-aligned families, faculty, and churches come together and bear fruit “thirty-fold and sixty-fold and a hundredfold.” If this good soil is created, tended, and developed, Mike believes, the fruit will be apparent now and for years and decades to come.
His strategic instincts are shaped by his leadership philosophy. A devoted student of Jim Collins, Mike believes in pairing deep personal humility with intense professional will. “I will be ambitious for the school, not for myself,” he says. “I will hand out credit when things go well and take responsibility when things go wrong. I want to get the right people on the bus and in the right seats. And I will always, always confront the brutal facts with grace and honesty.”
For the classroom, his vision is both confident and measured. “Wheaton Academy is already academically excellent,” he notes. “My focus will be on building upon that solid foundation with strong curriculum, rigorous assessments, and teachers whose craft is highly proficient and whose teaching integrates biblical truth into every subject.” He is equally passionate about the co-curricular experience, believing that athletics, fine arts, and service opportunities should deepen students’ understanding and active application of faith.
At the heart of Mike’s educational philosophy is a conviction rooted in the biblical design for the family: that school exists as a partnership with parents. “The school assists parents in developing graduates who are passionate about life and strive for excellence in every area,” he says. “The Christ-centered faith and worldview of the faculty and staff create an ethos, a culture, and a practical demonstration worthy of student emulation. Our teachers realize that they are often the program of study. Luke 6:40 tells us that students become like their teachers, and that truth must be at the center of everything we do.”
He envisions Wheaton Academy not merely as a good Christian school but as a model for all schools, public or private, secular or religious. “It will continue to be intellectually and emotionally stimulating, academically challenging, athletically demanding, and artistically uplifting,” he says. “Ultimately, Wheaton Academy will go on being a place where everyone, including students, parents, teachers, and staff, is elevated and reflects Christ to the world.”
A Foundation of Faithfulness
The transition from Steve Bult to Mike Rogers unfolded over several months of prayerful collaboration guided by the Board of Trustees, and it was marked by the same spirit of partnership that has long defined Wheaton Academy’s culture. Throughout the spring, Mike joined faculty and staff meetings, professional development days, leadership gatherings, board meetings, senior interviews, and community events, building relationships with the people who make Wheaton Academy what it is.
“I am excited for this next chapter at Wheaton Academy with Mike Rogers serving as Head of School,” Steve shared during the transition. “I have known Mike for nearly twenty years and have great respect for his heart, leadership, and commitment to Christ-centered education. I am confident our school is in excellent hands and that God’s hand is on this transition.”
Now, with Mike officially at the helm, the Wheaton Academy community looks ahead with gratitude and expectation. “I am already experiencing the depth of this community,” Mike says. “The faithfulness of the faculty, the passion of the families, and the legacy of Christ-centered excellence here are gifts from God that I do not take lightly. I am honored and humbled to serve.”
For over 170 years, Wheaton Academy has entrusted its mission to leaders willing to steward it with faithfulness, courage, and love. Steve Bult carried that trust with extraordinary grace for two decades, and his fingerprints will remain on the soul of this school for generations. Now, Mike Rogers steps forward, a man whose life, family, faith, and career have been shaped by God for exactly this moment. The Lord who has sustained Wheaton Academy for 173 years is the same Lord who leads it today. A new chapter begins, and the soul of the school endures.