The Mahoney Family Gift of Education

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Mary Mahoney’s first day as a teacher was a disaster. Almost. Hired the day before the first day of school, she arrived at her new classroom at Crest Hills in the Cincinnati Public Schools and found no desks, no supplies and a group of untethered teenagers who were all repeating eighth grade, some for the second time.

She was totally unprepared. Her job was to get them reading. Her response was to go home crying every day for the first two weeks.

But then, something changed. Befriended by two fellow teachers in the school, she followed their advice and learned how to connect with her students. The program was for disadvantaged children who struggled in school, but she learned that if she showed them love, she could connect with them, and they would love her back.

They are why Mary and her husband, Mike Mahoney, both Xavier graduates, have set up a scholarship fund just for first-generation students like the ones she taught at Crest Hills and later at Hughes High School in Cincinnati and now at Lakota West in West Chester. They were the kind of students who, because of family or other circumstances, need a lot of help finishing high school. The last thing they thought about was attending college.

“It’s a lifelong vocation for me, teaching all these kids from all walks of life, and I’ve really seen how important education is,” Mary says. “Mike and I talked a lot about it and he originally said, don’t you want do something for inner-city kids? But we said if we broadened it to say any first-generation person to attend college, what a difference that could make in a person’s life.”

Mike and Mary met on their second night at Xavier in 1983. Her roommate was from Cleveland and so were half the guys in Mike’s wing at Brockman Hall, so they got together for a party in her room in Kuhlman Hall.

They’ve been together ever since. Mary earned a degree in English and a teaching certificate, and Mike a BSBA in finance. They graduated together in 1987, and both have since returned for their master’s degrees—Mary’s in Humanities and Gifted Education, and Mike for his MBA.

For Mike, attending Xavier led directly to a career in banking and management that landed him at Cintas Corporation for the last 20 years, where he is Vice President for Corporate Development. He loves the similarities between Xavier’s mission of developing men and women for others and Cintas’ corporate culture, which inspired him to set up the scholarship to benefit students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“Cintas' culture is about ethics and doing it the right way, and when I think of the Jesuits, they say, what can you do for others?” he says. “It's about giving back, and when you’re in the position to do something for someone else, my goodness you’ve got to.”

For Mary, what was important were the scholarships that allowed her to attend both Xavier and Cathedral High School in Indianapolis—a blessing for her and her family.

“We didn’t have much money growing up, and that was one thing that was important to my father,” she says.

“We never went on vacation or had a new car or new furniture or ate in restaurants. But he always sent us to Catholic school and always managed to pay tuition, and then I got the scholarship, and so my first year at Xavier, I did well. I couldn’t have gone to Xavier without the scholarship, and I absolutely want to share the same with others.”

Teaching in the city schools opened her eyes to the need out there for so many families. After her rough start at Crest Hills, she embraced the students and they embraced her. “Those kids would have walked on water for me. By the end of my first year, I knew I was coming back.”

She spent eight years in the Cincinnati schools before staying home to raise their children. But she still is friends with some of her students from Hughes, and today she reads college entrance essays and writes letters of recommendation for her Lakota students. She says her experience at Hughes helped prepare her for her work at Lakota, where she teaches a lot of first-generation Americans and children of immigrants.

She and Mike want the Mary and Mike Mahoney Family Endowed Scholarship to benefit first-generation students to attend Xavier, because they both know how daunting it can be for some families to afford tuition.

“Being that first person in your family to go to college is huge,” she says. “I do think that whole college experience is important, though it’s not for everybody, but to be able to help them achieve is very important to me.”

But Mike also knows that donations made to the $250 million Together. For Others campaign help preserve Xavier long into the future. “Recruiting students is competitive, and I want to see the University continue to grow and prosper,” he says.