After leaving a successful career in real estate, Jeff Digel, then about 50, was searching for a new challenge. A day spent building a house with Habitat for Humanity in Hartford indirectly led him to establish a small, independent school in Hartford that has launched dozens of boys on successful academic careers. As cheerleader, fundraiser and first chairman of the board, Digel was the backbone of Covenant Preparatory School from its beginning a decade ago.
“After the New York real estate mindset, he was hoping to do something to help others,” said his wife, Jane. “It became his passion.”
Jeffrey R. Digel, an intense, athletic, charismatic philanthropist, died Oct. 18 from a fast moving cancer. He was 61 and a resident of West Hartford.
The back story of Digel’s involvement with the school is convoluted. The day he spent building with Habitat led him to join the organization’s board of directors, with responsibility for locating real estate where houses could be built for people in need. He received a call one day from former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, saying a young man was looking for a building where he could establish a school, and Digel arranged to meet Patrick Moore at a Habitat property in Hartford. The meeting was the catalyst for Digel’s activities over the next 10 years.
Moore was a former Canton resident who had spent a post-college gap year teaching school at an independent NativityMiguel school in New Bedford, Mass., whose educational philosophy was based on a model developed by Jesuits in the early 1970s. The program — at one time there were more than 40 Nativity schools around the country — was tightly structured to provide boys in grades 5-8 an intense academic program that was tuition free and included tutoring, evening study halls, summer school, field trips and support getting into parochial or private high schools. Classes were small, the boys got instruction on manners as well as art and music, and parents had to be strongly committed to the school. Instead of spending just one year teaching before graduate school, Moore ended up staying four years, and returned to Connecticut eager to duplicate the Nativity model in Hartford.
Moore described the school to Digel, and later drove him to New Bedford for a visit — and Digel was hooked. He offered to work with Moore to launch a similar school in Hartford, and, as he once said at a symposium at Middlebury College, his days of “roaming the house in his underwear” were over.
Before his work in New York with iStar, a real estate investment company he co-founded, Digel had worked in the real estate investment area of Aetna, and had retained many contacts during the decade he spent commuting to New York. His friends soon learned that an offhand invitation by Digel to have coffee was the preamble to a request for a donation. He rounded up potential donors at 4:30 a.m. to drive them to New Bedford so they could see how the school operated. “You couldn’t help but walk away and say, ‘This is fantastic. We have to do something like this in Hartford,’” said Dave Ingram, a Covenant board member and a friend of Digel’s since childhood. “That got me saying, ‘I’m in.’”
Over the course of the next year, Digel located some vacant space in the YWCA building on Broad Street for the school, and pitched in to hang wallboard and paint the new classrooms along with other volunteers. He lobbied nearby Aetna and The Hartford for donations, recruited a board of directors and solicited contributions relentlessly. With little money for staff, the school hired Americorps volunteers to teach, and connected the young teachers with more experienced ones. He pitched the plan to parents, who were asked to buy into a school that had no track record and that required them to prepare lunches for the teachers and help clean the school on weekends. (Parental responsibilities have changed over the years, and the teachers are now more experienced.)
“He put his total heart and soul into getting the school started,” said Jim Carter, another early supporter and board member. “His leadership raised millions and millions of dollars for this to succeed.”
The school opened in September 2008 with 25 boys in two grades and Moore as head of school. This year, there are 47 students, said Glenn Winfree, the current head of school, which recently received accreditation from the state Department of Education and the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools. Its graduates have attended high schools that include Loomis Chaffee, Northwest Catholic and Choate, and they have gone on to the University of Connecticut, Wesleyan and Providence College, among other universities. Volunteers help students prepare for standardized tests and complete applications to high schools and colleges. Although the school is non-denominational, it has a religious dimension. “To have more than just an academic learning experience, there’s a very strong emphasis on character,” said Ingram.
At the school’s major fundraising event on Dec. 1, O’Neil Brown, a Covenant graduate who is now a freshman at UConn, will share his experiences. On Brown’s first day in fifth grade, he walked into an empty room with piles of boxes and only 50 books in the library. Over the first week, he learned how to tie a tie, shake hands, and look people in the eye. “I was pretty excited,” he said.
“It’s definitely been a good experience. I feel like I would have been a completely different person if I hadn’t gone there,” Brown said. “The biggest impact is the way I talk and communicate with people.” He plans to major in marketing and work with non-profit organizations.
“It’s a unique school,” said Winfree, who has been there for four years. Digel “would quietly lead from behind the scenes. He didn’t look for recognition; he was more humble than that, but he stepped up when he had to. … He was a connector of people and knew people from all walks.”
Digel was born on March 29, 1956, and grew up in Smethport, Pa., a tiny town in northwestern Pennsylvania where his father was the president of a bank his grandfather had started. Digel graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont 1978 and had a master’s degree from the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University in Illinois.
Digel was married to the former Jane Allen, whom he met while they were in a training program at Hartford National Bank. He was an avid outdoorsman, whose nickname was “Uncle Ski” because of all the friends he introduced to the sport, and enjoyed hunting, skiing, sailing, hiking and golfing with his sons. He was a mentor to many.
The Digels were heavily involved in efforts to send medical supplies to Haiti through their church, and Digel quietly financed Habitat projects and church efforts when he saw a need. “He was not afraid to take risks or chances to do what he wanted to do,” Jane Digel said. “He lived life to the fullest.”
In addition to his wife, Digel is survived by his sons; Sam and Ben, his siblings, Marty, Julie Kopp and Peter; and his mother, Shirley.
Over the past few years, Digel, joined Figure Eight Properties, a West Hartford real estate management and investment firm, and served on the boards of Charter Oak Cultural Center and Achievement First Hartford Academy, but he never lost his passion for Covenant.
While he was in the hospital shortly before he died, he received a text from Brown, who mentioned that he was having some challenges in an economics course. Digel replied immediately, asking Brown if he wanted to come by and talk.
