KEA president-elect Stephanie Winkler
The Kentucky Education Association recently elected a new president and vice president. Stephanie Winkler, 4th- and 5th-grade science teacher at Mayfield Elementary School (Madison County), was chosen as KEA’s president-elect, and Lisa Petrey-Kirk was elected vice president-elect.
Winkler and Petry-Kirk will assume their new positions on June 15, each serving three-year terms.
Winkler said the position will allow her to “visit, collaborate and engage many groups of public school employees and other stake holder groups in their efforts to provide Kentucky school children a world class education.”
Winkler has been teaching for 16 years. She joined the KEA Student Program (SP) while she was at Eastern Kentucky University and served as state KEA SP president during the 1994-95 school year. She has served as president of the Madison County Education Association and of the 20-county KEA-Central District. She is a member of the KEA Board of Directors.
Winkler said her leadership skills are best exemplified by her ability to quickly identify and utilize the professional strengths of others.
“I love meeting new people and bringing diverse groups of people together to set goals and carry out action plans that make the lives of school employees and the students’ they teach better,” Winkler said. “I will work with many education collaboratives, our KEA staff and state and national leaders to help bring about positive changes in public schools for our employees’ working conditions and, ultimately, our students’ learning conditions.”
KEA Vice president-elect Lisa Petrey-Kirk
Petrey-Kirk, a National Board Certified Teacher, has taught all of her 26 years at Anderson County Middle School, where she is a social studies teacher. Petrey-Kirk has been active in KEA for about 15 years.
“I joined KEA because it was expected of me, but I ‘caught the bug’ and grew to love it because of Walter,” Petrey-Kirk’s said, referring to her late husband Walter Kirk. He helped organize classified school employees in Anderson County in 1998 and was a long-time leader in the Kentucky Education Support Professionals Association, which merged with KEA in 2002.
Petrey-Kirk is a member of the KEA Board of Directors and president of the Fifth District Education Association.
The 42,000 members of the Kentucky Education Association include teachers and classified employees in Kentucky’s public schools; retired educators; and pre-service teachers working to earn their Kentucky teaching certificates.
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