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Today's Featured Biography

 
Karen Kent

Married to Alan Ballard for 35 years. Have one daughter, Elise. My mother, who taught 1st grade at Fain Elementary has been living with Alan and I since my father died in March, 2010.
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and have had a private practice in Wyoming and Texas since 1988. Alan and I lived in Wyoming for 10 years during a very exciting time when the Western Front of the Rockies boomed with oil and gas exploration. We got to be directors/ board chairs, etc. of human service agencies that benefitted from the influx of tax money and oil and gas company gifts. Between the two of us, we helped our town of Evanston get a new community daycare (2 actually- brother, Fred came up and helped build one), a new youth group home, a co-located human service provision building, a new senior citizen center and senior citizen housing. Our friends helped build a new rec center, a new historic section which includes a remodeled train roundhouse, where our god-daughter will be married this summer.
We returned to Wichita Falls to care for our parents and so that Elise could go a private Episcopal School. While here, we have cared for our parents, Alan's mother, who was the counselor at Rider died in 2007 and his father is still living. All six of us parents and grandparents enjoyed raising Elise and watching her become president of the Student Council at Rider and president of Pink Darlings during her senior year. She got her BA and Masters of School Administrator at TCU.
Alan went to SMU, I went to Baylor and Elise went to TCU, so we have the North Texas private schools covered.
Alan works for his brother Dan and I work in my practice and for the transitional program for emotionally/behaviorally disturbed kiddos in WFISD at Rose St.School, plus see patients in the evenings in my practice.
I got to study with Carl Jung's group in Zurich Switzerland in the 80's and was the first woman Mental Health Center Director that the state of Wyoming had ever had. Elise was held by B.F. Skinner, who invented behavior modificaton, when she was a baby and we went to the APA in LA. Most importantly, I spoke on the peace circuit for a while and got to be with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama in 1989,when he found out that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. My love and admiration for him and our family's connection to His Holiness has been spread over the years since then and we feel blessed to be in the world with him. We have had an interesting and challenging life together and have wonderful friends who believe in peace and supporting each other and those in need in the world, whether it is in Wichita Falls or somewhere else in the world.

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