Winnie Kearns, LCSW describes herself as “very much a community person.” Kearns finds community in her church, her choir, even with the plants in her garden, and now at Parker. After the mid-semester departure of former Upper School Counselor Binita Donohue on November 12, Kearns joined Parker as her replacement almost a month ago. 

Kearns is not new to the “exciting opportunities and challenges” of Parker, having first worked at the school during Upper School Counselor Dr. Gary Childrey’s 2016-17 sabbatical. Childrey spent the sabbatical developing a broader health curriculum that Kearns will now teach, as she teaches freshman Health will teach Senior Seminar next semester.

Before she moved to Chicago in 1987, Kearns was a born-and-raised East Coaster who completed her undergraduate degree in Clinical Psychology at Cornell University. She received her Masters at the  University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, with a focus on mental health, community based intervention, and family systems.

She applied this background to her next communities, United Charities and then DePaul Family and Community Services, where she first met Childrey 20 years ago. 

It was here that Kearns established herself not only as a direct practitioner clinician but as a program supervisor and undergraduate professor with adolescent speciality. 

“I really thrive in a multidisciplinary kind of environment with a high level of activity and energy and collaboration,” Kearns said.

Though she had fallen in love with the “multidisciplinary” work, Kearns established a private practice in Oak Park in 2017.

“While that was really rewarding work,” Kearns said, “it was also kind of isolating.”

Donohue contacted Kearns and asked if she would be interested in the position, giving Kearns an opportunity to transition back into a collaborative environment. “When the opportunity came up to come back into that same role, I was thrilled,” Kearns said.

In her first year at Parker, “The Weekly” quoted Kearns in articles about copycat suicide and teen sexting. Now, students face another problem in addition to the standard hormone-induced high school trouble – the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kearns identified that the academic pressure at Parker and the complicated social navigation of a “small, familial” school had been amplified after the pandemic, describing a normal path of development through high school that had been “short circuited.” She teaches freshmen who are the first to have a full in-person year of high school since the Class of 2022, who she will teach in the spring. 

The pandemic also affected Kearns personally, increasing the sense of isolation she already felt in her private practice and limiting solutions she could offer to her clients looking for community support.

“It felt very disempowering,” Kearns said. “What I was trying to support is people who might be feeling isolated or not supported, and during the pandemic, there was very little to offer.” 

Her freshman curriculum is directly connected to the supportive work she did with her clients: helping them take care of themselves and develop healthy relationships.

“The transition was pretty smooth,” freshman Gannon Holt-Hall, Kearns’ student, said. “Ms. Donohue’s class was a little more conversation based, while Ms. Kearns is more her presenting information to us.”

Holt-Hall said Kearns has been teaching about anxiety and depression, taking over from Donohue who covered sleep and stress. On the website for her private practice, Kearns lists specialties in navigating social stressors, health and sexuality, school functioning concerns, and young adult individuation.

She has a senior of her own at home, who has helped her better understand the college process. The “weight of the world on me” feeling many students carry nowadays, Kearns said, is very different from her own adolescence, where college felt exploratory instead of life-defining.

“I joked with her the other day that I would be coming home and making sure that she knew some of the information that was being discussed here,” Kearns said.

Whether she is working with seniors preparing for their next chapter or underclassmen whose transition to Upper School was anything but normal, Kearns keeps an approach of bridge and support building to overcome barriers in what she described as an increasingly “existential” environment.

“We do our best in every domain,” Kearns said. “My hope is that I get to know somebody across all of the different aspects of their life.”