Team

KYOSA Staff

TOM HAGGARD
DIRECTOR

Tom has been working with afterschool and summer learning programs from the time he was 16 years old.  Since that time, he has risen through the ranks from youth worker to Site Coordinator and all the way up to Associate Director, where he oversaw multiple afterschool and summer learning programs that served over 2,500 students annually.  Tom has presented at local, state and national conferences on a variety of topics around out of school time programming.  He has served on the Kentucky Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers State Advisory Council, currently as co-chair.  During the 2017-2018 school year, he was chosen as one of fifteen Afterschool Ambassadors from around the country by the Afterschool Alliance.

STEPHANIE BARKER
COORDINATOR

Stephanie joined KYOSA in October 2019, and brings to the table a wealth of knowledge about rural education policy, school transportation issues, low-income student achievement, research methods, evaluation, and data mapping. Previously, she worked as an independent research consultant at the Evaluation Consulting Group. She’s also served as a research assistant at the University of Kentucky on a multi-year interdisciplinary study, funded by a $0.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), that examined relationship between network embeddedness and organizational outcomes among a sample of economic development organizations operating throughout Appalachian Kentucky, as well as an AmeriCorps volunteer through the Afterschool Alliance and Partners for Education at Berea College. She is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, where she studied political science and music. She also holds a MS in Social & Philosophical Studies of Education from the University of Kentucky Department of Educational Policy Studies & Evaluation, where she became the first ever student in the College of Education to be awarded the prestigious James Still Fellowship for graduate study in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Kentucky.

Leadership Team