At age 52, Jonathan Nateghi-Asli might not seem like a legacy donor. But since retiring from a nearly 30-year career in the Montgomery County School, Maryland, public school system, he started aligning his assets with his values. Among them was education, including his graduate student experience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education where he earned a master’s in educational studies in 2005. He has since included the school in his estate plan.
Nateghi-Asli also remembers what it was like when his mother died rather suddenly, leaving him and his father guessing at what her wishes would have been. The lessons learned led them to complete his father’s estate plan before he died last year at age 86.
“It’s not thinking about life versus death,” Nateghi-Asli says. “It’s just thinking ahead and saying, ‘All right, what do I want to do with all this stuff at some point in my life?’”
We spoke with Nateghi-Asli to learn more about his early — and generous — commitment to the School of Education.
Hopkins allowed me to explore programs at the highest quality research-based institution available. The School of Education was very project and implementation-based, and that was really important for me — to apply immediately the work that I was learning about to the jobs that I was holding at the time. And particularly now with education, the school is looking at the challenges that we face to get our educational system back on track post-COVID — not only at what’s going on in education, but they’re being innovative. They are going into school systems and supporting education in its ever-changing world.
While I was getting my master’s, I had also moved into a new position called a staff development teacher, which was a school-based training program. I was able to use what I was learning about curriculum, leadership, and building a school culture to my job. The other thing that was really great was this data-driven decision-making class. When I became a resource teacher at a different school, which was one year from a takeover from the State of Maryland because of test scores, it was the beginning of the No Child Left Behind Act. It’s all about the data. A strong focus of my work was developing a data system long before schools were doing this on a global scale and working with these teams of people to turn around the school. We had to do that in one year, and we did.
I was getting toward the end part of a career and looking at finances and property. It was time to make sure that all this stuff was on paper so it didn’t become chaos if I or my husband suddenly pass away. Our discussion was really about giving to what we’ve worked hard for — about helping people and making sure that people can make themselves better and have opportunities. Hard work paid off for me in my life, and I want that hard work to continue returning on its investment even when I’m gone. The School of Education is probably one of the best to focus on the education part of who I am and the importance of that.
I am a first-generation college graduate. I never really thought too much about that until I started working in a high school where we had a very diverse population racially and socioeconomically. What I noticed was a huge disparity of access to resources or knowledge compared to families who had gone to college and who lived in certain zip codes. I was helping all of my students but realized my minority students actually needed extra support, care, and awareness to help get them through. These students, who are now going into colleges and universities, are becoming the firsts in their families, and some of them are going into education. They’re going to need support throughout their career just like everybody else.
I want the American dream to continue, allow the melting pot to flourish, and remove barriers that immigrants particularly face daily, but especially in educational and white-collar employment. I want them to be able to bring their perspectives to the table in their programs to help them grow and for other students who may not be like them to actually hear and understand. And by planting that seed there, that seed will continue to grow and plant more seeds. This might take multiple generations to happen, but if I feel like I’ve dropped a few seeds and had a few plants come up and they have seeded, then that’s the right thing to do.
This story first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Planning Matters.
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Topics: Alumni, School of Education, Support Scholars