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There’s a stack of toys and kids’ clothes piled high in a corner of Melanie Jones’s office at Northeast Ohio Adoption Services in Warren. They’re keepsakes, stashed away by children who don’t know where they’ll be living next week or next month.
“These kids don’t have a lot, and they don’t always know what to expect when they’re going into a new place,” said Jones, a YSU alumna, social worker and adoption specialist. “I don’t mind keeping their things for them, just until they get settled.”
NOAS is a private, not-for-profit agency that provides permanent homes and foster care to teens and school-age children that government agencies consider hard-to-adopt.
Jones, honored as the agency’s Social Worker of the Year in 2008, works mostly with children who have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse or neglect. There are also sibling groups, teens and children with physical and mental disabilities.
Her challenge is finding people willing to offer her “kids” unconditional love and the stability of a permanent family, then providing those prospective parents with the training they need for long-term success. NOAS requires foster parents to complete a 40-hour training program; adoptive parents are urged to do so.
“There’s a big difference between our ‘babies’ and cooey little babies. Our babies can be unbelievably cute-looking, but they will sometimes cuss and punch and steal,” she explained. “I don’t discourage anybody who wants to be a parent, but I try to equip them, to prepare them. Our most successful parents are the ones who take the time to get educated.”
Jones grew up in Warren in a family she compares to television sitcom ideals like the Huxtables on “The Cosby Show.”
“We were financially-challenged, but we didn’t know it,” she said. “Our parents made sure we experienced a lot. They taught us to always do better and never to hate.”
Jones studied cosmetology in high school, along with college prep courses, then worked as a hairdresser to earn her YSU tuition. In 1980 she completed her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. “I call it my special seven-year bachelor’s degree because I worked my way through, and I paid cash,” she said. “That’s what took me so long.”
She started her career with Trumbull County Children’s Services, investigating reports of child neglect and abuse. “I found out that the stuff you see on ‘Law and Order’ on TV happens right here in Warren, Ohio,” Jones said. “People do horrendous things to their kids.”
In 1997 Jones found her niche when she joined NOAS as a permanency planning specialist. Since then she has placed more than 40 children and teens in permanent families and found loving foster homes for many more.
Jones’s heart for children spills over from her work life into her leisure hours. She runs an outreach for children with physical and mental disabilities at her Warren church, Believers’ Christian Fellowship, and leads a multi-cultural Girl Scout troop of more than 50 inner-city girls, ages 5 through 17.
But one of her best success stories is her own niece, now 22, whom she raised as a daughter since she was kindergarten-age. “I was a single career girl when she first came to me,” Jones said. “I had to learn to practice what I preach about being a parent. Now she’s the love of my life.”
Dr. James Chengelis sees some heart-wrenching cases on his daily psychiatric rounds at Boston University Medical Center, but he’s found a way to brighten even the most despondent patient’s mood.
 “Before I go, I ask the patient what we can do to make their day better,” said Chengelis, a YSU alumnus, director of psychiatric consultation liaison at the 581-bed hospital and assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Sometimes patients decline the offer. More often they ask for small comforts: a blanket, a newspaper or a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. If it’s possible, Chengelis and the medical students who accompany him on his rounds will fulfill the request.
“Traditionally, doctors don’t do that kind of thing, but you’d be surprised what a difference it makes,” he said. “I want my students to learn that part of being a good doctor is to be humane, to give your patients hope and optimism despite present difficulties.”
That passion for teaching empathy to student physicians won Chengelis three major teaching awards at BUSM in 2008, including the title Clinical Educator of the Year. What means so much to him about the awards, he said, is that they were decided by the college’s students and by a vote of his faculty peers.
Chengelis feels at home at BUSM and its affiliated hospital because their philosophies line up so closely with his: to treat every patient equally and with respect, regardless of their differences or their ability to pay.
“Boston University is a wonderful, wonderful place,” he said. “It’s one of the few places where all people are equal. We have patients from all over the world, we don’t discriminate based on income and we don’t deny treatment to anyone.”
Chengelis grew up in Boardman, the youngest of four children, and earned two bachelor’s degrees at YSU, one in combined sciences in 1978 and a second in sociology, anthropology and social sciences in 1979. His sister and two brothers all earned YSU degrees as well, and his mother, Evelyn, was a non-traditional student who graduated at the same time he did. “We’re truly a YSU family, and proud of it,” he said.
He earned a master’s degree in public health and health education at the University of Toledo, then stayed on to complete his medical degree at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo, now the College of Medicine at the University of Toledo. After that he was off to Boston – what he calls “America’s Athens” because it is home to 100 colleges and four medical schools.
Chengelis worked at several of Boston’s top medical centers – Beth Israel, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital – before joining the BUSM faculty and its hospital staff four years ago.
His priority, and what he wants most to teach his medical students, is treating patients with compassion and empathy along with medical knowledge and skill. “I have no children, so my students are like my children,” he explained. “I dote over them, and I want them to be good doctors.”
While he still thinks of the Mahoning Valley as “home,” Chengelis hasn’t been back since his mother and three siblings moved to Boston several years ago. The family bought a multi-family brownstone that contains several townhouse condominiums so they could all be neighbors.
But he hasn’t forgotten his alma mater. Chengelis has established two scholarship endowment funds and a Maag Library book fund at YSU, all in the name of his parents, the late Theodore P. and Evelyn Chengelis.
“What I loved about YSU is that the professors knew me. I was not just a number. They knew my name, they knew my hopes and dreams, and I flourished in that atmosphere,” he said. “I could have gone anywhere, but I chose YSU, and I think YSU played a dynamic role in my evolution as a professor teaching medicine and as a physician.”
Sean Jones had never heard of jazz as a kid growing up on Warren’s west side. Everything he knew about music then, he learned in church.
“There was some serious improvisation going on at St. James Church of God in Christ,” Jones recalled with a wide grin. “The organist would dialogue with the drummer and the guitar player and they would improvise off each other. I would always wonder why this wasn’t happening on the radio.”
Those early gospel music days trained Jones to appreciate intricate melodies and harmonies. When his elementary school band director Jessica Turner introduced him to jazz with a gift of two recordings by legendary musician Miles Davis, he was hooked.
“I’d never heard jazz before, and when I heard it, I knew that was it,” he said. “That’s what I was looking for.”
Now 30, Jones is considered a rising star in the jazz music world.
He graduated from YSU’s Dana School of Music in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in classical trumpet performance and then went on to earn a master’s degree in trumpet performance with a jazz emphasis from Rutgers University.
A prolific performer and songwriter, Jones is lead trumpeter for the celebrated Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in New York, a band co-founded and directed by his hero, jazz great Wynton Marsalis. He’s performed on every continent except Australia.
His trumpet playing was featured on a Grammy-nominated recording by the Gerald Wilson Orchestra in 2004, and that opened the door for a recording contract with Mack Avenue Records. Since then Jones has released four jazz recordings of his own, and a fifth is in the works.
The Jazz Journalists Association nominated the YSU alumnus for Trumpeter of the Year in 2007, a JazzTimes Magazine reader poll named him Best New Artist that same year and Downbeat Magazine ranked him a “Rising Star” in 2006 and 2007.
But while he loves to perform, Jones says his highest goal was to teach on a college level. He was just 25 when he joined the faculty at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh as a full-time assistant professor of trumpet and jazz studies.
“Some people think it all happened overnight, but it really didn’t,” Jones said of his early success. “It happened over about three years, and there was a lot of hard work and discipline involved. Like I tell my students, if you want to make money playing music and you don’t have discipline, forget about it.”
Jones began playing the trumpet in fifth grade, and he was already an accomplished jazz musician by the time he arrived at YSU as a freshman. He would spend his days in class, and then head for clubs in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Detroit and beyond to play and to listen to other artists until the early morning hours.
Three YSU faculty members - associate professor Christopher Krummel and the late professors Tony Leonardi and Esotto Pelligrini – stand out in Jones’s memory, but he has high praise for all the teachers at the Dana School of Music. “YSU has some of the most amazing teachers in the world,” he said. “They have the knowledge that a teacher has to have, and they also care about their students on a very human level. They communicate like brother to brother or father to son.”
Now living in Pittsburgh, Jones is working to bring a major jazz festival back to Pittsburgh and focusing on his solo career in hopes of being nominated for a Grammy on his own.
Besides music, Jones enjoys cooking and good eating. “When I come home to Warren, I’ve got a whole lot of places I want to go eat,” he said, playfully patting his stomach. “Eli’s Bar-B-Que, Charlie Staples Bar-B-Q, Belleria Pizza. I can’t wait!”
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