Ken initially came to Essex Community College (now the Community College of Baltimore at Essex) to replace Paul Nagy as a speed-reading teacher in 1961. At that time, speed reading was taught in the English Department. Later, Ken convinced the chair of the English Department and the head of Counseling that counseling faculty could teach as well as counsel students, and got himself hired as a learning skills counselor with teaching responsibilities. This was the genesis of the new Reading Department. By 1968 Ken’s position was full-time as head of the Reading Department under the Dean of Students.

Ken then hired his colleague Warren Edgar to be the second counselor with teaching responsibilities. Together they noted that the students not only had reading problems, but that they also had difficulty with math. With that in mind, Ken hired  Bobby Wilson, who had taught math and science at the Annex to North Point Junior High (where Ken had taught English and geography, 1956-1958). Together, these three faculty co-authored The How and Why of Study, which was used at Essex Community College and beyond. Looking back, Ken praised the Reading Department, crediting its accomplishments to:

“the faculty who made it up and their willingness to use new methods to meet their challenge. For example, Wilson, Edgar and I administered the tests prospective students had to take to prove they had the necessary skills to matriculate, or whether they required support classes.  Wilson designed study carrels with six stations, each of which had a tape player, which meant that students could come in at any time to take the test. On one occasion, a student was able to pause the test because he’d lost his car keys. No other community college in Maryland had that kind of flexibility. [At other colleges] when students were tested, they had to be tested at a specific time and place as part of a group.”

Ken later hired Liz Beck and other faculty to the Department, while he himself also taught courses at Loyola College. But by the early 1990s, due to political maneuvering within Essex Community College, the Department was discontinued. Of the initial three faculty, Bobby Wilson retired first, followed by Warren Edgar, and finally Ken in 1993. At the time of his retirement, Ken lamented the arrival of construction workers who came to destroy the carrels with sledgehammers, saying “they were beautiful carrels, and they were well-designed, and what do you have to do that for?”