Biography|Karen S. Lynch — The Ware High School That Sent Her Out

Karen S. Rohan was born in Ware, Massachusetts, on 30 December 1963.

She walked out of this public high school in 1980 still using that name.

The campus at 237 West Street is not the 1893 brick high school on Church Street, which sits in the town's historic district.

Ware finished a new high school in the early 1960s.

By the time she sat for classes here, this West Street site was already the town's secondary school.

A visitor in 2026 still finds Ware Junior-Senior High School on the same campus, sharing ground with the middle school and Stanley M. Koziol Elementary.

What happened off campus is a matter of public record she later chose to tell.

Her mother, a nurse raising four children on her own, died by suicide in 1975, when Karen was twelve.

An aunt took the children in.

The pin belongs on the school, not on a private house.

This is the public building where a girl from a mill town in Hampshire County kept going to class.

MassLive later recorded that the Ware school district listed her among graduates worth watching, still under the Rohan name, before her 2015 marriage.

She has said the habits formed in these rooms — showing up, working a problem through — traveled farther than the town line.

Boston College's Carroll School of Management took her next.

The accounting degree started as a practical choice from a place that did not mint executives as a local product.

Forty years later the same small high school would be able to point to a former student running one of the largest companies in the United States.

The building did not change that much.

She did.

Photo: John Phelan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons