Director Kathi Medcalf Receives MAEA's Highest Honor!

Every year the Maine Adult Education Association holds its annual conference for adult education professionals, administrators, teachers, guidance counselors and support staff.  This year’s conference was held June 22-24 at Colby College in Waterville with more than 175 professionals from around the state presenting and attending workshops and celebrating individual and program successes. 

 The culminating event of the three-day conference was MAEA’s annual Awards Banquet.  MAEA presents six different awards annually, including its highest honor, the Gerald LeVasseur Award.  This prestigious honor, is awarded to a citizen of Maine “who has performed unusual and outstanding work in the field of Adult and Community Education.  The individual’s contribution must be worthy of high recognition in accordance with the following: 
A. The importance of the achievements to Adult and Community Education and to the public interest must be so outstanding that the individual deserves greater public recognition than that which can be accorded by the annual MAEA outstanding service awards.
B. An achievement which has current impact in improving the delivery of Adult and Community Education or serving the community interest and exemplifying one or more of the following:
1. Displaying imagination in developing creative solutions to problems in Adult and Community Education
2. Displaying courage and perseverance against great odds and difficulties to ensure the existence of Adult and Community Education at a level to enhance the lives of the residents of the State of Maine
3. Demonstrating high ability in accomplishing extraordinary educational achievement in providing outstanding leadership in planning, organizing, or directing a major program of unusual importance and complexity, or in performing an extraordinary act of credit to Adult and Community Education and the adult residents of the State of Maine
4. Rendering long and distinguished Adult and Community Education service.”

 MAEA’s own Director, Cathy Newell, submitted the following as part of her nomination of SCAE’s Director, Kathi Medcalf.
 “Kathi Medcalf is a thoroughly deserving recipient of the LeVasseur Award. She is an exemplary director of a local program.  She pursues continuous excellence by monitoring her program, using data, staff and student progress, and building a strong organization. Her staff nominated her for MAEA Director of the Year honors in 2006, which she received. Kathi has build a wonderful program rising to every challenge, building daycare centers, moving the office, adopting ITV, reworking job descriptions, and above all rewarding staff performance. She has built a terrific program.
 Kathi has been a leader for adult education in Maine. Arriving in 2002 from Seattle, Kathi got her start in Sanford as ABE Coordinator in 2002, after a career teaching Chemistry. She holds 2 Masters degrees, one in Chemistry from Villanova, and one in Adult Education from USM.  She was named director in Sanford in 2003.  She was president of MAEA in 2007-2008 .
 Kathi’s remarkable and revolutionary accomplishments for Maine Adult Education included providing incredible leadership for the revision of the ABE/AEFLA formula in 2004 – she really can do math!  But clearly her greatest accomplishment was the leadership and daily monitoring she provides for the Maine Adult Education Web Portal, launched in January 2009 after a year of planning. The portal speaks for itself. 75 programs offering course listings, news from programs, quality and consistent web sites, on-line registration and payment. The data says it all from Jan 1 2009- March 26 2010, the portal took in $364,500 in revenue and 7,480 course registrations for programs, with the average online order: $48.72. There have been 305,000 visits and 1.7 million page views.  Traffic has consistently risen over each active period. January-March 2010 traffic has DOUBLED over Jan-March 2009 traffic. On average, traffic has risen more than 140% each active period.
 Now Kathi is leading the preparatory work for another revision of AEFLA moving toward performance-based funding, and in addition work on subsidy accountability.  She is truly a leader in the tradition of Gerry Levasseur and the previous recipients of the award and is going to occupy a good bit of space in the next history of adult education in Maine.”

Kathi was surprised to discover her supportive husband, Scott, in the audience at the banquet.  SCAE staff worked crazily to surprise her! 

The community of Sanford has so much to be proud of, with this amazing woman who gives so much time to improving education for families and adults in our midst!

Posted by Sue Colley  on June 28th 2010 | Read more in: Events