W EST MINST ER TODAY
A Dream Come True For Karen Thompson, middle school science teacher, working at Westminster is literally a dream come true. “This has always been the dream school where I wanted my children to attend,” says Mrs. Thompson. “I really believe that the Lord planted that in my spirit. At my church, I would see older children from families who had chosen Westminster, and there was a certain way about them. My son Zion was an infant at the time, and I was just taking it all in. I was a stay-at-home mom and my husband was working as an educator, so the possibility of Westminster in our future was completely unforeseeable at that point.” Despite the obvious obstacles, Mrs. Thompson says she continued to say that Westminster was her dream school for her children, though she never imagined she would teach there herself. At the time, Mrs. Thompson was committed to urban education, working as a high school biology teacher in the Jennings School District in North St. Louis. She began teaching at Jennings High School in 1995, immediately following her graduation from Drake University where she majored in biology.
home with her children and in 2008 returned to the Jennings district for another five years. During that time, Mrs. Thompson received her master’s degree in biology from Washington University in St. Louis and believes it was then that God began leading her to Westminster. “I was preparing to teach AP bio, and I was going to have to go much deeper into evolution than in my regular biology course,” says Mrs. Thompson. “I asked [friend and Westminster teacher] Aaron Layton for help in figuring out how I should broach this topic as a Christian. He connected me with Andrew Shaw.” When Mrs. Thompson met with Dr. Shaw to discuss the topic of faith and science, it was the first time she had ever visited the Westminster campus. “At that moment, I thought, ‘Oh, I could work here,’” she says. “That’s when it happened for me personally.”
At Jennings, Mrs. Thompson taught multiple biology courses including honors biology, AP biology, human body systems, and
Soon afterward, pieces began to fall into place for Mrs. Thompson’s
principles of biomedical sciences (PBS). Her instruction in PBS was
transition to Westminster. “It was God completely leading me,”
part of the biomedical division of Project Lead the Way, a STEM-
she says. “I went to the school website one day and visited the
focused program that has been adopted by hundreds of schools
employment page. There was a posting for an upper school biology
across the U.S. In 2003, she decided to leave her teaching job to stay at 9
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