Conversation with Vilanonva's Gregory Hannah: How One High School Teacher Built a Place for Everyone at Villanova

A conversation with Gregory Hannah, founder of LEVEL at Villanova University

Part of Every Kid Can's ongoing interview series, where we speak with professionals, advocates, and educators who work alongside people with disabilities every day, to better understand the barriers they face and how youth can be part of the solution. This interview was conducted by Kayla Jacob, Director of Every Kid Can.

When we reached Gregory Hannah, he was in the middle of his commute home to New Jersey, a drive he cheerfully described as "horrible." He had a free hour, a lot of stories, and no interest in giving us the short version.

We came to him because of LEVEL, the student group he founded at Villanova University that pairs students with and without disabilities. What we didn't expect was that the story of LEVEL begins in a high school classroom.

It Started With a Student Named Frank

In 2009, Hannah was in his late twenties, teaching and coaching at a high school in New Jersey. He had just gotten married and bought his first house. One of his students, Frank, had cerebral palsy, used a motorized wheelchair, and was non-verbal. He was also an honors student with his sights set on college.

Over four years, Hannah watched Frank do what he set out to do: he got into Villanova. Hannah figured that was the end of his part in the story. Then Villanova invited him to meet with the director of the disability services office, who wanted to understand how Frank learned. Frank wanted to be a full-time residential student, and the director was honest with Hannah. The campus could probably handle the classrooms and the notes. Socially, he said, the school wasn't ready.

He asked Hannah to come help build what didn't exist yet.

"Do I leave the future I was building to maybe create something new with someone I had worked with for years?" Hannah said. In June 2009 he left teaching, sold his house, and moved to Villanova with Frank. His wife, a special education math teacher of 23 years, stayed in New Jersey, which is why the commute is what it is. This fall he began his 17th school year there.

How LEVEL Got Its Name

LEVEL began with a student who broke her foot playing soccer. While she was on crutches, everyone told her how incredible it was that she was still coming to class. She realized that students with much harder disabilities were doing exactly that every day, with no six-week end date. She wanted to start a group, and Hannah was trying to build one, so they joined forces.

The name came from what Hannah calls his entrepreneurial side. Everyone at Villanova wore the V on a shirt, hat, or backpack, and he wanted a name that could go on merchandise too. So he Googled words with a V in the middle. "Level" stood out right away: a level playing field, level opportunities. LEVEL held its first meetings in January 2011.

Transactional vs. Transformative

Early on, students like Frank needed academic help, not because they weren't smart enough for Villanova, but because getting the work onto paper or typing an email took more time. The usual solution was paid work-study tutors. Hannah didn't want that.

"I deemed it a transactional relationship versus a transformative relationship," he told us. So he removed the money and built a volunteer, peer-to-peer support system. It has now logged more than 80,000 hours. The peers started out doing notes and ended up talking about music, TV shows, and what movie to see that weekend. The help was real, but so were the friendships.

Today the system runs differently. Students can scan a page with their phones, and when someone needs a chemistry peer, Hannah asks LEVEL's group of 300-plus members who had Dr. Smith's class. But the goal he started with hasn't changed: to show students with disabilities and their able-bodied peers how similar they are once they're given the chance to engage. He was also careful to say that "disability" covers more than what you can see. Students managing type 1 diabetes, Crohn's, sickle cell, or rare diseases are handling daily realities that others aren't, and he wants everyone in the same room.

The Barriers He Calls "Hurdles"

Hannah doesn't like the word barrier. He prefers hurdle, because it doesn't imagine a wall with two sides fighting each other. In 2011, the hurdle was mostly fear. People weren't against students with disabilities; they simply didn't know. A professor can be brilliant in engineering, nursing, or finance and still never have been taught how to teach a student with a disability. "I don't fault them for that," he said.

That's why he worked from the ground up instead of the top down. If students befriend a blind classmate, then when the professor walks in and sees three students chatting with him, the professor starts asking how to teach him too.

Some hurdles were practical. Villanova had no accessible transportation when he arrived, simply because no one had needed it. Instead of demanding it, Hannah helped build the network that eventually led to four ADA vehicles, at roughly $85,000 to $90,000 each.

He also pointed to hurdles still ahead. AI could support students with disabilities, but it raises questions about academic integrity and the credibility of sources. And the universal design that remote learning made possible during COVID could disappear if schools simply "turn the Zoom off." His question for each of these is the same: what reasonable accommodation can we make?

"Experience, Exposure, Opportunity"

At the end of the call, Kayla explained that Every Kid Can works at the high school level, in a community where students with disabilities aren't present at her own school, and asked what advice he had for a younger organization.

Hannah said he sees LEVEL as an employee resource group for students before they have jobs: a chance to practice connection before they walk into a workplace. The earlier young people are around people of different abilities, he said, the better prepared they are, "because the disabled community can come to anyone at any time." His own children, who are 13, 12, and almost 10, have no fear approaching someone with a visible disability because they grew up around it.

His own approach, he said, is to be relentless about creating moments: weekend retreats with students in motorized wheelchairs, blind students using power tools to build benches. He also described a friend in a motorized chair who is an avid gamer with an adaptive controller. Put him next to someone who's never seen one and they'll ask questions, then end up playing a game together.

He also gave a warning. He wants students to understand the difference between exposure and exploitation. Posting "Look at Billy, he's blind, isn't that a shame" makes the audience feel good at someone's expense. Showing a blind student with a 4.0 who's about to study abroad does the opposite: it changes how people see what's possible.

When we pushed for one piece of advice, he laughed and said his answer changes depending on whether he's had a rough day. But the heart of it, he said, never does: experience, exposure, opportunity.

He closed with a note that meant a lot to us. Not everyone will end up at Villanova, and that's fine. "That doesn't mean those places of understanding don't exist elsewhere," he said, and he hopes communities like ours are one of them.

Every Kid Can is a youth-led initiative working to expand social and sensory inclusion for people with disabilities across our community. This interview is part of a series in which we speak with professionals, educators, and advocates to better understand the barriers to inclusion and how young people can help close them.