Miss Penny manages children's records, edits many of KELC's written materials, hosts tours for prospective families, and assists in classrooms.  Penny followed her preschool daughter to KELC in the fall of 2001.  Sara is now in eighth grade.  Like her brother Nathan, a high school freshman, Sara also attended KELC's "Summer on the Farm" school age program.

Miss Penny credits the tremendous environment at KELC; the children, parents, staff, animals, and the beautiful, natural setting, with creating a campus-wide sense of well-being.  She appreciates KELC's integrated, across-environments, experiential approach to learning, the quality of curriculum for every age, the teachers' knowledge of children's social, emotional, motor, and cognitive development, their positive approaches to teaching and inclusion, and their genuine affection and respect for all of "their" kids.  

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in the mid-sixties, she was the fifth of six children (three boys, three girls) in a very mobile family; living in many southern states - and Mexico, before settling in Wisconsin in her adolescent years.  Throughout middle and high school, and at times throughout college, Penny worked in her family's daycare center.  Having spent much of her life surrounded by children, she finds such an environment natural and most enjoyable.

In college, Penny took coursework in child-related fields, but ultimately pursued interests in literature and foreign study.  During her junior year, she sold or gave away most personal belongings, fit most of the rest into a backpack, and flew to Europe on a one-way ticket.  She spent more than a year overseas - studied in Poland, worked on a kibbutz (communal farm) in Israel, hitch-hiked around Ireland, admired Norway's fjords, Egypt's pyramids, ancient ruins in Greece and Italy, and watched the sun rise over rooftops in Morocco while a muezzin called the faithful to prayer.

Recalling her travels, Penny feels like a relic:  She 'settled in' at Poland's oldest university three months after the world's biggest nuclear disaster (Chernobyl) sent a radioactive plume over the area.  Students were cautioned to eat nothing that grew or fed from what grew in the contaminated soil.  After a mildly harrowing crossing from East to West Berlin, she photographed friends at the Berlin Wall.  Few could have predicted that the infamous Wall would fall just two years later.  She also traveled through Yugoslavia before the last historic upheavals left Serbia and Montenegro in its place.  Penny loves to travel, still, but has set sights on return trips to India, the place of her children's birth, and northern Mexico, where she and extended family have life-long friends. 

Penny enjoys family gatherings, time with friends, reading, playing soccer, biking, and, mostly, simple time with her kids – playing games, talking, running errands, and taking long walks together.  She is pleasantly surprised to find herself enjoying these early teen years just as much as earlier phases of her children's lives (for now), and would say that she learns more from her children, these days, than ever before.  Penny is grateful for the opportunities and experiences of the past, yet finds parenthood to be the most formative, risky, and rewarding adventure of all.  

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