Staff & Faculty

Kelly Ruse was born in New Hampshire and lived in Florida before relocating to Southern California after college. She started her career in education at California Learning Center, an after-school tutoring center, in Santa Barbara in 1997 and later purchased the business in the year 2000. She quickly expanded operations including a larger location which enabled the business to increase its enrollment from 50 to 150 students. In 2006, she was the co-founder and Director of Makai Day School, a small private school for children with learning difficulties where she helped develop curriculum and manage the day to day operations of the school.

Kelly served on the Board of the Directors for the Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic for 3 years and was an active volunteer for several youth programs at the Santa Barbara YMCA. She sold her business in 2012 and became an educational consultant for the Santa Barbara School District. After Kelly and her husband learned that they were expecting fraternal twins in 2016, they made the decision to relocate to Southern Oregon where Kelly currently works from home as an online business manager.

Kelly enjoys spending time at the lake, camping, hiking and traveling with her family. Kelly’s twin boys attend first grade and her Godson attends 7th grade at Madrone Trail. She is grateful to be on the Madrone Trail school board and looks forward to contributing her expertise in the fields of education and business management.

Cori Royer was born and raised in San Diego, California before going off to college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. There she graduated with a degree in Art with a concentration in Photography and a minor in Education. She continued her migration north, getting her teaching credential at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.

After graduation, she spent two years in the Straight Up! AmeriCorps program, assigned to a local school where she worked one on one with students in the classroom, ran organized games at recess, and helped at the after school program. During that time she met her future husband, and after finishing the AmeriCorps program moved with him to a tiny town near Garberville, California, deep in the redwood forest. There she got a job at a small, rural, private Waldorf-inspired school as a class teacher in a mixed grade classroom. The school was off grid and had solar power, a back-up generator, composting toilets, no cell service, and a wood stove in each of the two classrooms at the school. She would have to chop kindling and start a fire each morning in winter before the children arrived. She also taught all the subjects, since there were no specialty teachers other than a volunteer parent to teach Spanish. She taught there three years before getting married and moving to the Rogue Valley to be closer to her husband’s family.

In 2011, Cori came to Madrone Trail as the Games teacher when her daughter was 10 months old. A few years later she had her son, and after a brief maternity leave, babywore him while teaching for the rest of the 2014-2015 school year. During the 2018-2019 school year, she was the Interim Director of Madrone Trail. She is now back in Games, and is still in administration part-time as the Assistant Director. In her free time, Cori enjoys hiking in the forest, running, making quilts, reading, bullet journaling, and spending time with her family.

Sherrie was born and raised here in the Rogue Valley and has seen a lot of change over the years. She graduated from Rogue Community College with an Associate’s Degree in Human Services. She most recently worked at OnTrack Addictions Recovery for six years working with adults and most recently teens, which she found very rewarding. This is Sherrie’s first opportunity to work in a school and is enjoying discovering the new experiences of it. She is glad to be here at Madrone Trail and is entertained daily by the joy, innocence, and comedy of the children. She has a daughter and son-in-law and four grandchildren.