BRUNSWICK

After a year of work volunteering for the Brunswick School Department as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, Amanda Kierman has decided to stick around as she begins her professional career — working with the REAL School, a Falmouth special education school recently acquired by the district.

Walking the hallway at Hawthorne School with Kierman, Assistant Superintendent Pender Makin can’t believe Kierman’s time is up. The two started work for the school department at about the same time and now this is Kierman’s last week.

Makin said that the last year with Kierman has been “inspirational.”

Born and raised in Portland, Kierman graduated from Clark University Worcester, Massachusetts last May and was looking for something to do in transition between her academic life and the working world.

“AmeriCorps VISTA is a really great thing to do — it’s almost like a gap year after college between school and going down your career path,” Kierman said.

Kierman will be beginning this next school year as an Education Technician III working at the REAL School on Mackworth Island in Portland. The REAL School is an alternative education program for students with behavioral needs recently taken on by Brunswick.

Kierman said she looked at the REAL School following a glowing review from a family friend who works there. Plus, she had spent the whole year working with Makin, the former director of the school.

“I just fell in love with the educators there and the kids and their entire vision and the social-emotional way they educate kids is exactly what I want to do,” Kierman said.

One of Kierman’s biggest projects this year has been to come up with a volunteer management system for the schools.

Kierman worked with members of the community, parents and staff to come up with an application process and an accompanying handbook for volunteers as well as a means to implement the system.

Volunteers for field day, lunch duty supervision and classroom aids will be more efficiently utilized — hopefully all aligned via mass communication such as email alerts or text.

“There’s some really amazing parent volunteer groups in the area already, so I was able to work with them and see what was needed most and what’s been well established already,” Kierman said.

Kierman said much of her work for the Brunswick district has been to build capacity for the school district to meet the needs of the most underserved families in the area.

Kierman said she’s done a lot of work with McKinney- Vento, the homeless education law. Under the law, students who are experiencing homelessness can come to the school district with or without documentation of where they live, and receive an education.

For purposes of the law, homelessness can mean couch surfing, living with a friend or any other irregular or inadequate nightly housing.

Makin said Kierman worked closely with the Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program to come up with ways to identify children who would qualify in our district for free and reduced lunch.

“If we can get a more accurate representation of students who qualify to actually go through the process of applying for that assistance, it helps the student greatly, but it also helps our district to painting a more accurate picture about what our struggles are,” Makin said, noting that some federal and state controlled funding depends on those numbers.

Makin said Kierman also worked closely with MCHPP to establish Sunday Suppers to Start a Super School Week — a dinner once or twice a month to not only feed the community in underserved areas, but build ties between kids, families and the district.

Makin said Kierman has also worked closely with the stakeholders in developing framework for the district’s new strategic plan.

“She did so much to support the efforts of collecting the information with a specific eye toward making sure that underserved populations were given a voice in the process,” Makin said.

“I’ve loved working with the Brunswick community. I don’t think I’ve ever met a community that’s more invested in it’s children and it’s education system as Brunswick has been,” Kierman said.