Kyleigh Roberson is an art teacher here at GEHS. Roberson grew up in Baldwin and went to high school there. Roberson also shared her memory of her old art teacher.
“I went there [from] second grade up to senior year,” Roberson said. “I grew up over there, and my art teacher was actually horrible. Absolutely horrible.
Surprising to some, Roberson shared how she was on the track and field team in high school.
“I think my most missed thing about high school is track and field,” Roberson said. “Everyone’s always shocked because I have glasses and I’m an art teacher, but I was a sprinter, so I did the 100, 200, or four by one relay.”
While at state for track one year, Roberson and her team accidentally made a mistake that she still remembers to this day.
“The first girl comes up to me, and I take off,” Roberson said. “I put my hand back. I’m waiting, waiting, and I hear my name and the baton hit [my hand]. So we dropped it in finals at state. It was bad. But then that summer, the US Women’s four by 100 team dropped in front of the world. So it didn’t make me feel too bad, but it was bad, that’s like in my top bad moments.”
In her free time, Roberson usually spends time outside caring for her son and dogs
“I have three dogs, so they take up a good amount of our time,” Roberson said. “I have a son that’s seven and a half. He’s autistic, and he [really] loves outside, [he’s] very high energy. So we go to the park a lot. I live by Ernie Miller Nature Center, so we’ll all go there. And he just loves running and building things.”
Though her son and pets take up a lot of her time, Roberson also loves to do crafts and garden.
“I actually love, you know, the Paint [With] Diamonds. I love very meticulous, detailed things, so I’ll get something like that. I’m excited to be gardening now that it’s nicer [as well].”
Roberson’s three dogs all have different personalities and are all different breeds.
“[We have] a Basset Hound, very short, huge, 70 pounds, whines all the time,” Roberson said. “And then I have a little miniature American Eskimo dog. She’s very bossy. She thinks she’s the alpha. And then we have a little Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Who’s just he’s, he’s the baby. We call him the original baby.”
Roberson started teaching a class while she was in college, and then eventually began teaching at Johnson County Community College. However, the JCCC class was a bit too stressful.
“In grad school, I got my degree in jewelry design and metalsmithing,” Roberson said. “So I taught [an] intro to jewelry class for two years [in] college, when I was in school. Then I taught a year and a half at JCCC over here, and it was a Saturday class, so I had to teach intro, intermediate, and advanced at the same time. So it was from noon to five. Little too crazy, [I] could not do that very long.”
After her JCCC class, however, Roberson began virtually teaching a class at the University of Kansas.
“[After that] my professor at KU had health issues and was like, ‘Hey, could you come up and teach my class for a semester?’” Roberson said. “[But then] COVID hit, so I had to figure out how to do fire, like working with your hands in the studio, [virtually]. And I had international students, so that was kind of crazy.”
Roberson first started really liking art during grade school. Her senior project, which allowed her to have a business, helped her grow that fondness for art, as did the jewelry class she took at KU.
“My senior project was if I had my own jewelry business, because I always collected beads and made things,” Roberson said. “So I shadowed someone that had her own jewelry line, and went to a couple trade shows where she was selling her work [and] I made prototype pieces. [When] I went to college I took a little bit of everything. And I was like, ‘oh, there’s jewelry classes at KU, that’s kind of cool, maybe I’ll take a class.’ Loved it. I was good at it. And so I just pivoted [and] went that way.”
Roberson’s favorite food is chocolate, and while she doesn’t prefer white chocolate, she really likes any other kind of chocolate.
“I’m just gonna straight up say chocolate. Chocolate, anything,” Roberson said. “Well, not white chocolate, that’s technically not chocolate. It’s not that it’s not good. Like, I like [drizzling it], but anything else, I’ll even get the one where it’s like 70 or 80% cacao on there and it’s a little bitter, but then, as you eat, I don’t know, you just enjoy it anyway.”
Roberson has been teaching at GEHS for almost four years now, and one of her favorite things about teaching is getting to watch everybody grow.
“Honestly, since this has been my fourth year, I tell the seniors they are my babies, because they started when they were freshmen, and so I’ve seen them get older, and now that they are adults and leaving,” Roberson said. “I think I’m gonna be like an emotional mess at graduation, because it’s like, we see you guys every single day. My husband will joke, like, ‘How are the children today?’ Because it gets to the point where it’s not just students. We know you guys, your lives, things like that.”
Another one of Roberson’s favorite aspects of being a teacher is her co-workers and the support that they give each other.
“Everybody that works here is amazing,” Roberson said. “And so there are those days where you’re like, ‘Oh, the students,’ like, ‘I’m having a hard day.’ ‘I’m tired.’ There are all these things, and then you meet your co-workers and you get really close. I like Mrs. Britt. I joke with her. She’s like my work mom. My first year, it [was] like trial by fire. You learn, but you don’t know until you get in here, and she gave me words of wisdom, got me through things I didn’t think I could get through.”
Roberson’s advice to students in high school is that it’s alright if they do not have everything figured out, but they should have backup plans in mind just to be safe.
“I think, especially in high school, it’s proposed a lot to students [that] this is just what you do,” Roberson said. “You’re supposed to know, you’re supposed to have an idea, and your idea should be pretty spot on exactly. And I tell everybody, you can have your plan, and you can have your dreams, like the White Castle in the Sky, but life can come out of nowhere and kind of throw you off. And so I’m like, have your dream and then kind of have some backup, just so if it doesn’t work out, you’re not completely defeated.”
