A Launching Pad For Tomorrow’s Teachers

Keene State’s history of preparing future educators is well chronicled and dates back to 1909 when Keene Normal School opened with the mission of educating young women in the region. Those graduates were able to practice teaching in and around Keene. Having unpaid student-educators teach their children was a boon for taxpayers, whose financial ante toward public education diminished as a result.

The earliest Keene Normal School students studied education, pedagogy, and the liberal arts and sciences. A confluence of historical events, including a devastating hurricane, a world war, and the Great Depression, brought considerable and unforeseen pressures to bear on the institution.

But the school persevered by leveraging an evolving and growing liberal arts program and reputation, and emerged for the better, as Keene Teachers College, in 1939. Twenty-four years later, the school transitioned again, this time to Keene State College, which enrolled roughly 1,000 students at the time. Among the students who were part of the first class to attend and graduate from the college under its new – and current – name was Betsy Coll ’67, who used her degree to become a physical education teacher. Her extraordinary teaching career spanned 34 years.

In all its iterations, from 1909 until today, Keene State has launched thousands of Education careers, here, in New Hampshire, across the country, and around the world. School leaders, principals, early education center directors, and in especially large numbers, teachers in public schools, private academies, charter schools and corporate childcare centers.

Keene State and its Educator Preparation program claim many points of distinction, not the least of which is the national accreditation it has maintained since 1954, and that 14 of its undergraduate programs offer paths to recommendation for endorsement for NH Licensure to the NH Department of Education. Only one-third of all teacher preparation programs in the country are nationally accredited.

While many Educator Preparation programs in New Hampshire are state-approved, only Keene State and the University of New Hampshire are approved by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP).

The college’s deep and enduring partnerships with schools in the region; depth and tenure of caring and available faculty; graduate program options; and strong job-placement rates are other distinguishing qualities of the program.