HS Art Teacher Receives Unsung Hero Award
High school art teacher Karen Kennely was recognized by the PTA at the Founders Day Celebration on Feb. 16th with the Eileen Martin Unsung Hero Award for her unstinting service to children. A woman who exudes energy, enthusiasm, and warmth, Mrs. Kennely is exemplary in her dedication not only to students in her class but to other children and to the community itself. She is not just an art teacher; she is a teacher who gets the whole community involved in cultural events.
Mrs. Kennely has been active in the local PTA and in the Suffolk District PTA and has served in various officer and chair positions on both PTA levels. Before coming to North Babylon, she worked in Queens as Education Coordinator for the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts and she still has contacts there.
Karen has been awarded four National Endowment for the Arts grants and has written lesson plans through this program that can be accessed on the web for teachers throughout the country. Karen has been able to study Jack London, Mark Twain, Women's Suffrage, and Free Black Artisans. While she loved the Jack London study the most, and uses his writing to teach art to her students, she found the Free Black Artisans course to be the most powerful and enlightening because, as she says, we are all familiar with slavery but we just don't know that much historically about free blacks.
An artist herself whose media are pastels, clay, and photography, Karen wants her students to have fun as they learn. She tries to introduce them to all aspects of art so that they can find what best interests them. She loves high school teaching because she can teach art all day long. She also likes the extracurricular opportunities in the high school which allow her to relate to students outside of class as an advisor. She makes sure her students and club members have plenty of cultural activities and outside of school experiences. To that end, she often takes them into NYC to visit museums, to see plays, to look at architecture, and to get saturated in the various cultural opportunities there.
Every year Karen takes students and parents on a European trip that she designs herself. It is a educational event with visits to interesting cities, museums and historical places. With Mrs. Kennely as a guide, these trips are cultural gems.
Karen's Director, Dr. Kim Lowenborg-Coyne, recognizes her as "a truly gifted educator and artist." She says that "Mrs. Kennely believes it is our privilege to bring all of our students to the world of the arts and she begins every lesson with the children in mind and always provides each child with the highest quality educational experience available. She is a treasure."