Like mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, woman graduates from Alverno College

Jacob Carpenter

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Somewhere in the family photo albums, there are pictures of young Sara Willert holding class in front of a chalkboard, lecturing to her room full of dolls.

Sara Willert received her Bachelor of Science in Education degree at the 155th commencement ceremony at Alverno College. She comes from a long line of women in her family who have graduated from the college. Sara holds a photo of her great-grandmother Sylvestra Szyperski. Sara's mother Dawn Willert (right), 49, and grandmother Veronica Wielebski, 73, are all graduates of Alverno College.

As a child, Willert shared the same passion for teaching that her grandmother and great-grandmother harbored. Then, as a young adult, she discovered another common love she shared with her family: Alverno College.

“As I went through my Alverno journey, it was more and more of a fit,” Willert said.

Willert followed in the family footsteps Saturday by becoming a fourth-generation graduate of Alverno College, the all-female liberal arts school on Milwaukee’s south side. School officials said they could not find another family with a longer lineage of graduates than the Willerts.

Willert’s mother, grandmother and great-grandmother have all taken the same stroll across the Alverno College graduation stage, each earning undergraduate degrees. As Sara walked the stage Saturday, her mother and grandmother were in attendance, toting a picture of her now-deceased great-grandmother dressed in a graduation cap and gown.

“Yesterday, when we were doing rehearsal, that’s when it really started to kick in how cool this is,” said Dawn Willert, Sara’s mother. “It’s just a different sense of pride."

The family’s ties to Alverno College started in the early 1960s when Sylvestra Szyperski, then in her late 30s, became one of the school’s first adult students.

Sara Willert holds a photo of her great-grandmother Sylvestra Szyperski, who was also a graduate of Alverno College.

Szyperski had graduated from Milwaukee’s South Division High School and prepared to attend college as a teenager, but her family couldn’t afford tuition. After marrying and starting a family, Szyperski’s husband died, so she moved back with her parents on W. Oklahoma Ave. and S. 42nd St. and decided to attend Alverno College, just a quarter-mile walk from home.

At the same time, Szyperski’s teenage daughter, Veronica, joined her mother at the school. Both would earn teaching degrees, graduating in the mid-1960s.

“We didn’t see each other much on campus,” Veronica Wielebski said. “But my future husband, he’d take me to dances there, and she’d be chaperoning as we danced.”

Szyperski taught in Hawaii and Florida before returning to the Milwaukee area, where she educated middle schoolers on the city’s south side and in West Allis. Veronica, who would marry and take the last name Wielebski, spent 30 of her 32 years teaching math at South Division High School.

The teaching bug skipped a generation with Wielebski’s daughter, Dawn, but the Alverno lineage continued. Dawn Willert graduated in 1999 after majoring in business, and today she’s the executive director of an assisted living facility in West Allis.

About 15 years later, Dawn's daughter, Sara, continued the tradition, applying to just one college. All three graduates praised Alverno College’s hands-on, collaborative approach to education, which stresses real-world and project experience over test-taking.

Sara Willert said it’s too early to know whether a fifth generation will carry on the legacy. She’s moving to Illinois, with hopes to return to the Menomonee Falls area in a few years. But another Willert, her sister, will graduate from high school in 2018, with Alverno College on the radar.

“My grandfather had no education, and my grandmother had a third-grade education because she had to work on the farm,” Wielebski said. “Today, I know my grandmother would be grinning ear-to-ear.”