Dr. Vincent Izuegbu has just started his fourth year as principal of Ida B. Wells Preparatory Elementary Academy, an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School. He works hard to make it a neighborhood school that gives its Bronzeville students a global perspective. Every year, he and his staff, along with parents, take a group of students on a trip to one country in Europe and one in Africa. “That’s part of the importance of the international trips,” he says, “think about the global context, not just your neighborhood or even the U.S., but the globe.” In 2025, the plan is to go to Spain and South Africa.
In his office, which also serves as a conference room, Vincent proudly displays several pictures from their inaugural trip to Senegal. One includes people standing around an enormous baobab tree that is more than a thousand years old and whose trunk appears to be over 50 feet in diameter. In another photo, he and the rest of the group pose in the courtyard of a reddish stucco building known as The House of Slaves on Gorée Island, about two miles off the Senegalese coast. Behind them, through a dark hallway, is the Door of No Return, where enslaved Africans were led to the boats that would carry them to the Americas.
The choice of going to an African country on every trip is an intentional one. As of 2024, 91.1% of Wells students identify as Black, and Vincent wants them “to connect back to the motherland and make sense of that journey.” For him, the experience of that travel can cultivate persistence in the classroom and beyond. “I keep reminding them, ‘Remember, you are the descendants and children of the slaves that survived,” he says, reinforcing the students’ resilience and the need to see class assignments and projects to completion despite challenges.
The stop in a European country on every trip is more of a logistical one — flights from Chicago to African countries tend to stop in Europe on the way, he says, “so we’re going to take advantage of that.”
It’s clear that Vincent himself is globally minded. His office is decorated with the flags of many countries around the world. It also has a framed map of Nigeria, where he was born and raised, and where his journey to the principalship at Wells began. His mother was a teacher and later became a principal, and Vincent was one of her students. After public primary school, he and his siblings attended Catholic high school, which was important to his father. He not only wanted his children to receive an education grounded in Christian teachings, but ideally, he wanted one of them to join the clergy.
Indeed, Vincent would eventually attend a Catholic seminary, where part of his training — and a major part of pastoral work, he would learn — was teaching. After two years, he found that education, and not the clergy, was his calling. “I decided that I want to choose a different path,” he says. His mother’s profound effect on her students’ lives helped inform this decision. He frequently saw her past students “just stopping by and saying hello and reminding my mom [of what] she did for them while they were in the classroom, being their teacher for so long, and thanking her for all of that,” he says. “And it kept happening over and over and over again, and I kept seeing that . . . so that really connected with me. It’s a good feeling to help build the capacity of others and to see others do well,” he added.
His mother’s experience also allowed her to give him some important advice on leading a school. “Always know that people are looking up to you, even your teachers, your staff,” he recalls her telling him. “They want to see what you’re going to do.” This has helped shape him as a principal. “You really don’t know what you’re going to run into on a daily basis. But I think that if you’re fair to people . . . you just have integrity and are trustworthy — they will fight for you. They will work for you, and they will do what you ask them to do, because they know it’s for the betterment of the school.”
Another part of Vincent’s leadership is thinking about the students’ futures beyond Wells. “The graduate profile of the Wells Prep student is always in my mind,” he says. The school’s slogan is “All Roads Lead to College.” To make this a reality for as many students as possible, he has established a partnership with South Shore International College Preparatory High School, an IB World School like Wells, where students can earn college credit before they graduate. This, he says, provides students a pipeline from pre-K to college and a career beyond.
The international trips, the partnership with South Shore, the IB World School status, Wells’ current classification as a Commendable School by the Illinois State Board of Education, and the fact that it’s one of the two Apple Distinguished Schools in Chicago Public Schools, are the result of years of work by Dr. Izuegbu and his predecessor, Jeffery C. White. Vincent was the assistant principal from 2011, when the school merged with Mayo Elementary, until 2022. In the ten years before he attained the principalship, however, Vincent had to take on more of a leadership role even as an assistant principal. It was a learning experience, to say the least, and allowed him to begin shaping the school.
Unfortunately, the former principal passed away in 2021, and about eight months later, Vincent became the principal of Wells. He and his staff remember Jeffery White fondly and continue to honor his legacy. The walls of the school’s gym feature not only a photo and biographical information about its namesake, Ida B. Wells, but also photos and information about its former principal. A banner hangs from one wall declaring it the Jeffery C. White Memorial Gymnasium.
All of this means that even though he has been a principal for three years, Vincent has much more school leadership experience. With that, he is now able to provide his own advice to other educators who would like to become a principal — just like his mother did to him.
A few things are crucial, he says: First, you have to be in it for the right reasons. “Why do you want to be a principal?” he recommends asking yourself. “If it’s for more money, [you] need to look to a different field.” Knowledge of curriculum and instruction is also extremely important. “You have to be able to understand the parts of instruction, understand learning,” he says, and “know when teachers are being effective and when they are not.”
You also need to be as mentally ready for principalship as possible. The best way to do this is to be an assistant principal first. “You are an inch closer to what principalship is like,” he says. It’s important to cultivate an eye for talent so that you can maintain a strong team as well. “If you don’t have a good team, even with all of your knowledge . . . it’s going to be difficult.”
Finally, after he was announced as a Chicago Public Schools 2024 Game Changer, Vincent noted that having a clear vision for a school is paramount to success as a leader. He said that his “secret sauce” is his clarity of vision, which informs his team and gives birth to an unstoppable drive for innovation and systems of educational practices that bind his school teams and community together. But that didn’t happen over night. “Over the years,” Vincent continues, “my vision for [Wells] kind of developed gradually and clearly.”
That vision has guided his approach to everything from building his team to instructional and distributed leadership to providing life-changing international field trips. Beyond providing students a pathway to college and a career, “our goal is global citizenship,” he says. “We want to be able to — in our own little way — solve some of the world’s problems, as little as they could be. It could be helping to provide water to villages in Africa. It could be tree planting. It could be plastics recycling. It could be providing refurbished iPads to poor students and fixing leaking school roofs in developing countries. It could be preventing hunger and starvation — whatever we could do.”