Teaching Teens To Talk It Out
For Kate Kerman, words are what we live by

By Rachel Lebeaux, Sentinel Staff, June 22, 2002

When she was growing up, Kate Kerman says her family "tended to brood about things. We didn't necessarily talk things out." Ironically, Kerman now makes a living out of encouraging others to do just that-talk things out.
It's a more creative way of coming up with solutions than bashing people," Kerman said.
Kerman is the coordinator for Cheshire Mediation, a local organization that offers counseling services in the Keene area. Since the fall of 1999, Kerman has been coordinating a peer mediation program for students at Keene High School.
In a peer mediation, students sit down and discuss their disagreements with a neutral student mediator, who tries to show them ways to solve their problems with words rather than violence.
William W. Harris, an assistant principal at Keene High, is a big supporter of the program.
"Kate is absolutely terrific and we're very fortunate to have her," he said, "She's not only got excellent skills when it comes to executing mediations, but great interpersonal skills."
In March 2000, Kerman held a mediation training session for Keene High students, and this winter she led a peace-making training session for six students and fifteen adults who work with the schools. Some of her teen mediators also have helped train 4th and 5th graders at Fuller Elementary School in Keene.
There were about 35 mediations at high school this year. Most dealt with the hurts of rumors, insults and disputes over boyfriends and girlfriends-problems that plague most teenagers.
"Kids might feel uncomfortable around adults or administrators, and just want to sit down and talk to teens," said Amanda Donohoe, one of the peer mediators. Amanda, who just graduated from Keene High School, spent a year with the mediation program and worked about 15 mediations.
"Sometimes rumors start and they are so angry, but when they sit down and finally tell each other 'I never said that,' they realize that things are fine between them," she said.
More and more students are requesting mediation, Harris says, and he makes referrals whenever appropriate.
Kerman was also present this spring when a group of Keene High School students, who had been suspended from school for protesting an Army recruiting truck on school grounds, met to discuss their punishment with Keene High School principal Victor P. Sokul.
The aim, Kerman said, was to come up with "more constructive consequences than sitting in detention."
During the 90-minute meeting, the students and Sokul were able to agree on an alternate consequence. Some of the students were able to do work for the school rather than serve a suspension-"a win-win situation," Kerman said.
Sokul agrees. "The solution made sense, as opposed to sitting," he said. "She helped facilitate that meeting, and was very helpful with that."

A quiet beginning

Peacekeeping as a profession was a natural path for Kerman. When she was in college, a girl with whom she went folk dancing every week, as well as her future husband, Ed, introduced her to Quakerism.
The Quaker tradition of combining religious beliefs with social and political action, as well as its emphasis on peaceful resolutions, appealed immediately to Kerman, who had been raised an American Baptist but who was constantly exploring her spirituality.
"These were people trying to live out their beliefs," she said. "It wasn't a Sunday thing but an everyday part of their lives."
Kerman grew up on a 10-acre farm just outside of Madison, Wis., where "we prided ourselves on being unconventional." Her parents promoted an atmosphere of open-mindedness, tolerance and intellectualism.
Kerman planned to graduate early from high school in Wisconsin, but when her family moved to Pennsylvania during her senior year, a school guidance counselor told here she would have to backtrack in her studies and take 10th-grad English and U.S. history in order to graduate.
Her father called his alma mater, Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich. The school said it would accept Kerman even if she hadn't completed high school, because her SAT scores were so good.
When she arrived in Kalamazoo in the fall of 1967, Kerman says "my antenna went up about Quakerism," and she began attending the religious "meetings" regularly with Ed and another friend. Some of the Quakers in that meeting had been conscientious objectors during World War II, a stance that was particularly appealing to students at the time of the Vietnam War.
"I basically became a Quaker the first time I walked in," she said. "I've never though of myself as anything since. I liked their approach to life."
The Quaker belief in self-education had a major influence on Kerman's decision to drop out of college in the spring of 1969. She was a sociology major, but realized that social work would have better fit her interests.
"I took hold of my own education at that point," she said. She decided she wanted to "learn what I want when I want without worrying about my grades."
Kerman's educational beliefs were further influenced by the book "How Children Fail," by John Holt, a critique of the public schools. His work gave her an incentive to return to formal schooling. She wanted to get a teaching degree so she could legally home-school her children.
When she received a pamphlet from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Mich., detailing an independent studies program, she knew then that she had found a school with a "philosophy I was compatible with."

The next step

She and Ed were married in 1970 and their first daughter Ada, was born a year later. Aquinas allowed Kerman to do her practice teaching with Ada, who learned to read when she was 3.
Kerman home-schooled all three of her children: Ada, Hannah, a half-American Indian girl who was 11 weeks old when they adopted her in 1976; and their son, Jesse, who was born in 1979.
Encouraged by Quaker friends, Kerman published three pamphlets and several articles dealing with home schooling.
In 1983, the family moved from Michigan to the Philadelphia area to study Quaker history at the Pendle Hill Study Center. Ada, however, said she didn't want to live at the center, and Kerman recognized that "being a teenager is a community experience," which her home schooling could not duplicate.
In the winter of 1986, the family visited the Meeting School in Rindge, where faculty and students lived on campus and cooked, cleaned, did farm chores and learned together. The school, founded on the Quaker principles and individual academic attention, aligned with Kerman's' philosophies of education. Best of all, "Ada immediately fell for it."
Kerman, too, was intrigued by the idea of living and learning as a community. She soon found that the Meeting School was looking for teachers, and with Ed's approval, the family moved to a faculty house on the Rindge campus in June 1988.
Some of the students at the Meeting School had not succeeded in a traditional public school environment, and seeing them "opened our eyes as to what kids have gone through," she said. Her own children lived at other faculty houses while school was in session, but they saw each other every morning at community meetings and "they did their laundry at our house," she laughed.
In 1996, after eight years at the Meeting School, they moved to a 29-acre farm in Marlborough that had a "rather small house." Despite that fact, they brought some of the Meeting School with them. Since they moved in, they have welcomed 15 people, including many former students, to live with them in the modest, three-bedroom home.
"There was a very confusing summer with 10 people living there," she groaned good-naturedly. "But I really like living in a community with a lot of different ages."
Kerman tutored some of the students, and once set up an organic farming-geology class for a student who was only three credits short of graduating.
She got a part-time job with Cheshire Mediation, where she had been a volunteer, in March 1999. Kerman was well prepared for the job: in her first spring at the Meeting School, she had taken a 35-hour mediation course and then another in 1996.
She started her work with parent-child mediations. One that sticks out in her mind was a session between a girl who had run away from home and her father. That mediation took place a week before a court date.
The session went so well that the judge ordered that the father and daughter continue with mediation instead of opting to take the girl out of her home.
At a group meeting some time later, Kerman heard the girl describing to her friends what a difference the mediation sessions had made.
"I don't always get to hear this," Kerman said. The experience showed her the immediate impact of her work.
"The goal, of course, is to make it so people can do that kind of communicating on their own," she said.

Point of hope

In the fall of 1999, Kerman was asked by Keene High School to help launch its peer mediation program, a project that has kept her busy every since.
"She was always there for somebody. She did a great job of organizing, and was ready to do anything to get people involved. She would hold the meetings, brainstorm, contact people, everything," said Donohoe, who will be going to Nichols College in Massachusetts in the fall.
"She's a funny, strong woman," added Donohoe. "She's got a lot to offer and I absolutely enjoy working with her."
According to Harris, Kerman's positive impact on the school and the students in unmistakable.
"She's available, the turn-around time is quick, and the results are positive," he said. "People just like Kate, and have every confidence in her as a mediator."
The connection she made at the Meeting School and the emphasis on non-violence she promotes in the peer mediation program at Keene High are especially important to Kerman today.
"Peacemaking is extremely important to Quakers, so mediation is a way to work on it at a most basic level," she said.
"After Sept. 11, I was glad to be working with teenagers," she said. "They're my point of hope."

 

 

 

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