• Education can be a path that leads back home
You might think that Peabody-Burns High School senior Kate Huls is all serious business: She’s a prestigious Governor’s Scholar, she earned a 4.0 GPA, she completed college algebra during her junior year, and has a laser-like fix on starting a business of her own.
But for all the drive that got her straight A’s for four years, Kate is a study in teen balance. Asked what memories she’ll tell her kids about someday, it’s for sure going to be random scraps of humor from school band antics, she said — like the time she stuffed her tiny 5-foot, 2-inch frame into a band room file cabinet drawer, egged on by a trombone-playing German exchange student nicknamed “Frito.”
You had to be there, she admits, but the photo he captured of her red-faced and contorted will forever send her into giggles.
High school had its challenges. One, she said, was staff turnover.
“Basically every year we get new teachers, and it’s kind of hard to build trust and relationships,” she said.
Her biggest personal challenge was time — juggling classes, extracurriculars, and work at her mom’s pizza shop.
The job, she said, gave her firsthand experience with the ups and downs of a small-town entrepreneur — in addition to learning to be a cook, cashier, cleaner, and bookkeeper.
Her high school personal finance class, she said, gets big credit for giving her “real world” grounding in taxes and insurance.
It’ll all come in handy when Kate commutes this fall to Wichita State University. She’ll pursue a degree in business management and accounting, which she hopes will help her with the entrepreneurial idea she’s hatched: a car-detailing shop back home.
“I see big opportunity in Burns for my little business,” she said. “Everyone here has a car, and everybody needs a car cleaned at least once in their life.”
She sees not just personal profit in bringing her talent back home, but a boost to the community.
In her valedictory speech she’ll encourage the other members of her class to think about that.
“I’m going to motivate my class to hang around,” she said. “You should think about where you grew up and where your roots are.”