In August of 2015, three people met at a Panera Bread in Toledo. Phillip Kilgore, who ran the Barney Charter School Initiative, had a question for Mr. Robert Pruger and Mrs. Janet Ragan: could they bring a classical education — real books, Latin, the seven virtues, all of it — to northwest Ohio?
Mr. Pruger had been quietly exploring the idea for years. Mrs. Ragan had been in conversation with BCSI since 2012. By the end of that meeting, the three of them had made the decision. They would build a school.
Then came the years no one writes about.
A board, a plan, and eighty donors.
Mrs. Cheryl Garlow, Mrs. Kathleen Sallah, and Mrs. Anna Woycik joined Mr. Pruger and Mrs. Ragan as the NOCA Founding Board. In 2017, Dr. Larry Fanelly and Professor Lee Strang came on. Later came Matt Dietrich, Ann Curry, and Eleanor Kemp. None of them drew a salary. All of them gave time.
Together, they raised $250,000 from more than 80 donors — families who wanted their own children (and their neighbors' children) to have a classical option that didn't come with a private-school bill. One family's contribution stood out: the Delp family, whose generosity was the pivotal gift that turned the dream of NOCA into a plan.
A building. A ribbon. Two hundred students.
On September 14, 2019, the school cut the ribbon at its Glendale Avenue campus. Founders, donors, teachers, families, and — for the first time — students. It had taken over four years of Saturday mornings, late emails, and asking one more person for help. The doors opened.
Two hundred students walked in that fall — a K–8 school to start, with one new grade added every year after. The next year, three hundred. In May of 2024, the first class of NOCA seniors walked across the stage at Commencement. Today, the Academy serves nearly six hundred students, kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Growing on purpose.
As the school grew, the founders established a second organization — the NOCA Foundation, formed in 2021 — as a dedicated charitable fundraising vehicle to support the Academy's long-term financial health. NOCA secured its permanent home at the Glendale campus and expanded: in January 2024, the school unveiled a new 15,000 sq ft Upper School wing — six classrooms, two science labs, and a multi-use space built for the first full graduating classes still to come.
It isn't a victory lap. NOCA is still small enough that every child is known by the adults around them; still run by families whose own children sit in the seats they helped build.
A school, still becoming.
The mission the founders set out at that Panera table — to train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a rigorous, content-rich classical curriculum — is the same one you'll see in a NOCA kindergarten classroom tomorrow morning. What's changed is that there are six hundred families in it now, instead of three.
We'd be honored to tell you the rest in person.