Creative, collaborative educator.
Hands-on experience in curriculum development and television production.
Clear, concise writing for every audience.
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Kathy Kinsner has spent decades as an educator, beginning as an intrepid high school sophomore who tutored the next-door neighbor boys in reading.
She holds two masters degrees, one in education (Bowling Green State University, OH) and one in television, radio, and film (Syracuse University, NY), and her primary interest has always been the intersection between the classroom and the practical world outside it.
After a decade of public school teaching, Kinsner heeded the advice of career-change experts and informational-interviewed herself into two children’s television internships in New York City. She received job offers from both companies, and eventually became a producer at one of them. While working in television production, Kinsner learned the pleasure of collaboration and the joy of examining an issue from every possible angle, considering how to tell a story so it would be best understood by kids.
She has three Emmy Awards for her work as a producer on the PBS series Reading Rainbow, and received an NAACP Image Award and Primetime Emmy nomination for the series’ first one-hour special, LeVar Burton Presents: Act Against Violence. She has written/produced TV series and specials for and about children for A&E, The History Channel, and Court TV.
Kinsner has been a salesclerk at J.C. Penney’s, a pizza waitress, a paint-it-yourself pottery instructor, a legal temp, and a personal assistant, and knows what it takes to succeed at an entry-level job.
More recently, she’s created curriculum material for middle and high school students, and has written eleven children’s books for classroom use. Her freelance writing experience has informed her work as an editor — soliciting writer input, providing clear and sensitive feedback, and insuring prompt payment.
She prides herself on the depth and breadth of her experience with kids — from her first teaching assignment in rural southeastern Ohio to her most recent — a community-building project in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. Her work in children’s television production has taken her to classrooms from Los Angeles, CA, to Concord, NH, and included collaboration with executive-level partners at the National Education Association and National Middle School Association. Eight years ago, she became a mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and has been lucky enough to see her Little Sis progress from a truant freshman to a senior making A’s and B’s.
Currently, she’s the Director of Program Development for Roads to Success, a non-profit classroom guidance program dedicated to career exploration and education planning. She joined the RTS team in 2005 as its third employee, and was responsible for the creation, execution, and annual revision of 3000 pages of detailed weekly lesson plans for grades 7-12, including Facilitator Guides, Student Handbooks and Portfolios, and Parent Newsletters. During the program’s development and pilot phase, she oversaw the work of a program developer, two supervisors of field staff, and a small group of freelance writers, one of whom offers this endorsement: “I would be thrilled to rave about you to anyone, any time.”
Kinsner hopes that her natural curiosity and respect for her subject matter and audience are evident in everything she produces.