From mock trials to prosecutor, life-long journey brings teacher to law career - Courier-Gazette & Camden Herald
Kathryn King was sworn in this month as the new assistant district attorney for Knox County.
Her arrival with the district attorney’s office is the culmination of a life based on working toward social justice.
King gravitated to law during a 30-plus year career in education. Her first teaching job was in Dexter where she spent two years, before teaching two years at the middle school in Hampden. In 1990, she was hired at Hampden Academy where she would stay until 2017.
While she was initially an English teacher, she soon was assigned to teach American history and public policy.
King attended a law seminar concerning fairness and justice that she found so compelling which led her in 1993 to have the school participate in a mock trial program put on by the Maine Bar Association. The team of students, with her as the coach, won the first six Maine State High School Mock Trial championships.
The mock trial process helped students gain confidence, speak on their feet, and feel personal power, she said. King then cobbled together a class that taught those skills.
In 2001-2002, King took a one-year sabbatical at the University of Maine School of Law in Portland. She had a desire then to turn to law but waited until her young son and daughter completed their schooling and post-graduate schooling.
In 2016, she was named a Lowell Milken Center Fellow for Unsung Heroes. The Center noted King wanted her students to develop a love for social studies that would spark a lifelong relationship with the democratic process, as well as enable them to engage confidently and effectively in the making and critiquing of public policy.
While teaching at Hampden Academy, King was recognized by the American Bar Association, the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, the Maine Bar Association, and the Choices Program at Brown University as an exemplary educator.
In 2017, she left Hampden Academy and enrolled at the Maine School of Law. While at the law school, she was selected as a rural law fellow where she was assigned to law practices in rural areas. That included a time in Damariscotta and then Calais.
King was sworn in Dec. 3 in the Knox County Superior Courtroom by Justice Jeffrey Hjelm, who graduated from Hampden Academy.
King succeeds Lynn Madison who returned in private practice earlier in 2021. Madison had joined the district attorney’s staff in March 2019.
Kathryn King, right, is sworn into the Maine Bar on Dec. 3 in the Knox County Superior Court by Justice Jeffrey Hjelm.
source: https://knox.villagesoup.com/2021/12/31/from-mock-trials-to-prosecutor-life-long-journey-brings-teacher-to-law-career-2/
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