By Ayla Dickerson
Mrs. Mary Kiger returned to McNicholas High School in the fall of 2021 as a teacher in the SAIL department. For the 2025-2026 school year, Kiger switched disciplines and can now be found in room 167 teaching AP Psychology and Financial Literacy. She is also the teacher representative of the newly founded club “Women in Business.”
Current social studies teacher Mrs. Mary Kiger grew up in the Eastgate area and attended St. Veronica School. She then went on to graduate from McNicholas High School in 1991. Kiger’s favorite subject in high school was history; she said she specifically loved European history. “I took AP European History as a sophomore and I loved it.”
In 1995, after she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Cincinnati, Kiger moved to Washington, D.C. “When I graduated from UC, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I had a friend who lived in Washington, D.C. and was like you need to move here. So I did,” Kiger said. While living in D.C., Kiger worked in the private sector and the government. After living in D.C. for a little more than a year, she decided to move to Seattle, Washington, in 1998, for a couple of years and worked as a paralegal at a law firm. When Kiger returned to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2001, she began graduate school at Xavier University, obtaining her master’s in secondary education and her teaching license in 2002.
Her teaching career began at Roger Bacon High School as a social studies teacher. “While I was there, there was a need for an intervention specialist for students who just needed some extra support. And so, I decided to go back to school to get my licensure to be an intervention specialist. So, I have a dual [license],” Kiger said. This dual licensure is what has provided Kiger with the ability to be able to teach in the SAIL department as well as social studies classes.
After Roger Bacon, Kiger spent nine years working in the school services program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital where she assisted students who spent extended time in the hospital with their schoolwork. “I enjoyed it, but COVID changed some things. I was working from home a lot. I noticed I always kept an eye on McNick’s website to see what openings they would have because it was one of the schools I would leave Children’s for,” she said.
Kiger’s teaching career brought her to McNicholas in 2021 where she worked in the SAIL department. “I loved working in SAIL and getting to support my students in that way, but I also really enjoy teaching content and being able to focus on that,” she said. Kiger said she decided to switch disciplines because “there was an opportunity to start AP Psychology and that was very intriguing to me. It was a new opportunity and a new challenge.” To be prepared to teach AP Psychology, Kiger had to take a workshop over the summer where she connected with other teachers and received an abundance of resources and information to be able to effectively teach the class.
In Kiger’s free time she enjoys trying new restaurants with her husband, antiquing, and watching shows on Bravo. She has two dogs: “Mavis and Buckminster.”
“Returning to my alma mater was very comfortable because I spent so much of my early life here. Not only as a student, but also as a young child because my brothers attended McNick. In some ways, it felt like coming back home. It was familiar and welcoming,” Kiger said.
The McNicholas Milestone 