Innovator Vol. 38 No. 1 - Fall 07: RE-IMAGINING TEACHER EDUCATION
Return to contents Kevin Karr (ABED '91 CERTT EDUC '91)
When Northside principal Kevin Karr transferred to King, another Ann Arbor elementary school, the parents and kids he’d left behind said they’d miss him. He never anticipated how much one family would miss him—enough to move, just so their two kids could attend the school where he was principal.
“I was touched,” he acknowledges—the more so because he and the mother had occasionally clashed. However, those who’ve observed the U-M School of Education graduate on the job aren’t surprised. “Kevin is a natural leader,” says former Ann Arbor school board member Kathy Griswold.
Now 39, Karr taught at Northside several years. When he was just 30, after a brief stint as acting principal, he took the top job. Karr’s biggest challenge was to improve the dismal reading and writing skills of too many students. When he left after six years, the reading and writing test scores had risen from below average to among the district’s highest. Karr emphasized “balanced literacy,” an approach that encourages both group and individual reading. He visited classrooms regularly. “You have to both deliver the message and support the teachers,”
he says.
At the more affluent Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, Karr deals with professional parents who sometimes set very high goals for their children. He works on helping parents develop and set realistic expectations—while forcing himself to be straight about his own. His courses at U-M, he says, led him to set “very high standards for the work I do.” (Another bonus of attending U-M: he met his wife, Stephanie. She teaches math and science, and they are the parents of Ryan, 12.)
Karr has a master’s degree in educational leadership and is a former Michigan Marching Band scholarship winner. He had pondered more lucrative careers than education, but his enjoyment of helping children learn won out. The gratifications can be sweet. Encouraging King students to write letters, he was stunned when U-M head football coach Lloyd Carr, responding to a fourth-grader’s letter, showed up at school on Karr’s birthday. (Karr had joked to King students that the football hero was his “long lost” cousin, who spelled his name differently.) The letter in itself brought Karr pleasure: “I have to keep this letter top secret,” the girl had written, “ because we don’t want my nice, caring, fun principal to know.”
Story by Eve Silberman
