Karen Schmalzbauer served as the third Community Education director for 14 years starting in 1978. Dr. Don Butler, Community Education’s first director, was her mentor. “The way Dr. Butler set up Community Education was such an asset,” Schmalzbauer said. “We had access to resources others would have loved to have had.”
Under her direction, Community Ed grew exponentially. “It was a prime time for Community Education to expand,” she recalled.
Milestones achieved during Schmalzbauer’s tenure include the first after-school program housed in Kentucky schools at McNeill Elementary in 1983, with a second program at Potter Gray Elementary in 1984. By 1991, after-school care expanded to seven sites.
Super Summer Club was first offered at two elementary schools in 1991.
Schmalzbauer is most proud of the Bowling Green-Warren County Rape Crisis and Prevention Center (now known as Hope Harbor,) which Community Education helped establish in 1985.
“A friend who had been raped years earlier was appalled by the lack of resources available to survivors of traumatic events such as hers,” Schmalzbauer said. “We secured funding, advertised for a volunteer director, and opened an office next to ours in the former High Street School facility.”
The center started with $500 in funds from the local board of realtors. Schmalzbauer and her friend covered every shift on the crisis line until they could recruit volunteers. The 24/7 crisis line is a critical service Hope Harbor provides today.
Originally from St. Paul, Minn., Schmalzbauer earned a bachelor’s degree in education in Wisconsin and a master’s degree in adult learning from Western Kentucky University.
Schmalzbauer left Bowling Green to become the state community education consultant, overseeing all the community education programs in Kentucky for the Department of Education.
Now retired, Schmalzbauer and Gippy Graham, who held the first community education position at the state level and is credited with facilitating the growth of community education throughout the commonwealth, live in Florida, where she teaches yoga, stretching, and water aerobics. Schmalzbauer has two children and two grandchildren.