Kathy McTaggart - Doing her part to stop violence

 

Katherine K. McTaggart  

(1943-2012)

Kathy McTaggart, champion for violence prevention

Katherine McTaggart, better known around the community as Kathy, was loved by the countless young people whom she befriended over her 16-year career as a licensed therapist at various Santa Monica schools. Her specialization was working with adolescents and their families.

Her official title was School and Community Partnership Coordinator in the SM-Malibu Unified School District. In the early 1980s, Kathy was the on-site therapist at Olympic Continuation School, where she counseled high-risk and gang-involved students. She met with their families and enabled many young people to stay in school and resist drugs and other dangers that their peers were involved in.

Kathy developed a genuine rapport with her students, which in turn led to long-lasting friendships. Over the years she stayed in touch with many of her former students, both those at Olympic and those at Santa Monica High School.

In 1988 Kathy was honored as YWCA Woman of the Year. She was active in youth-serving organizations in the community such as the Police Activities League (P.A.L.), where she served on the Board of Directors. As a part of city and county social service networks, she had extensive knowledge of community resources for youth and families. 

Violence Prevention

Violence Prevention aims to prevent the infusion of physical, emotional, and psychological distress from occurring.  Instead, meaningful dialogue serves as a preventive measure to ensure that violence does not become a solution to disagreement or a developing problem.

In the first decade of this millennium, Kathy and others in Santa Monica connected to form a Community Violence Prevention Coalition. We sought solutions to youth and community violence through education, community dialogue, and advocacy for services and policies that would result in violence prevention and intervention. Conflict de-escalation was a central training we supported.

Education and early years

A valedictorian of Suffern High School in Suffern, New York, Kathy graduated from Smith College summa cum laude in 1965 with two BA degrees, one in social work and one in art history.  Then she earned two MA degrees in art history and in child development from New York University, followed by another MA in Family and Child Counseling (MFCC) from CSU Northridge. She married and raised two sons.

Prior to settling in Santa Monica, she had worked in Hong Kong, Indonesia, and New York.  She is a person of value who will always be remembered.

"A baby is God's opinion..."

We are in dark days, but Carl Sandburg had a comment for us in times like these: "A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on."

When I gave birth to my first daughter, my grandmother gave me a small white cushion with those words embroidered on it.

Now as, my granddaughter approaches her first birthday, the felon in the White House is doing his best to make sure that the world as we know it does not go on. 

He wants to banish the people of Gaza from their war-torn land by the sea and convert their homes into a playground for the very rich, a Mediterranean resort like Monaco--and somehow add Canada, Greenland, and other nations to the fifty United States.

God has another opinion--that old people and their old prejudices of world domination should not go on.

My grandmother's family owned slaves in Georgia, "But they were good to their slaves," she would say. 

They weren't good enough to free them, and she occasionally used figures of speech that were racist. I remember thinking, when she died, that it was necessary for one generation to die and be replaced by a new point of view.

You will die, nightmare president. You will be replaced, and the people younger than you will learn from your mistakes.

From Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1948) Ch. 2: 

"A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients." He continues: Before humans learned how to make fire or a wheel, they knew how to make a baby (paraphrased).