As a freshman in college, Kathryn Jasper was a history major with a political science minor and was considering going into law. It was an elective course — educational psychology — that caused her to switch gears. She wrote a research paper on the effectiveness of Head Start programs, and “was fascinated by what I was finding,” she says.
From there, she took more education coursework. “Those classes didn’t feel like work,” Jasper says. “It was fun. It was exciting. It was something that I was passionate about. I ended up really loving the classroom. My shadowing experience as an undergraduate helped me decide to go that route.”
Jasper has been an educator, inside and outside of classrooms, for 12 years. She’s entering her seventh year at Hutchison, where she is the director of Hutchison Leads, a leadership development program for girls in 9th through 12th grades.
“We focus on girls learning more about themselves as leaders,” she says, “figuring out their personal leadership style and how that is going to look for them as they journey through high school and then out into the real world.”
As part of her job, Jasper conducts small group meetings with students, looking at things like gender and leadership and the challenges and successes women have. She also brings in speakers to the school. Last year, as they looked at careers where women were underrepresented, they partnered with majority-women engineering and architecture firms to hold a panel event for the students.
They also go on field trips throughout the city to see leadership in action. Among those field trips is an annual visit to Regional One Health, where they observe the NICU, “and the angle of leadership and civic engagement and policy,” says Jasper.
“We look at the area of public health in the city and infant mortality, and what the NICU has done to combat that. It’s a fascinating case study.”
Jasper has a 3-year-old daughter, Ruthie, who attends pre-K at Hutchison, and another daughter on the way. Through her work at Hutchison, she has “fallen in love with girls education; in seeing what it does for our girls, how they’re able to be independent and free to be themselves,” she says. “The instruction really caters to girls and how girls think.”
But it’s the relationships Jasper builds with students that she enjoys the most, and seeing some transform from introverted “wallflowers” into leaders. “I’m working with the girls every day and getting to know them,” she says. “I work with them from freshman year all the way to senior year, and I keep in touch with a lot of them in college and beyond. The personal stories are what drive me.”
Above all, her goal is to help educate girls for the modern world. “We want them to have this exposure and experience where they’re informed and engaged on a civic level,” she says, “where they are empowered.”
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