By Kalen Allen, Digital Creator and Television Personality
I turned 30 this year, and for some reason it made me look backward. Not because I wanted to live in the past, but because I wanted to understand how I became who I am. When I ask myself what shaped me, what steadied me, and what gave me permission to become myself before I even had the language for who I was becoming, one of the clearest answers is a school.
I attended a public magnet school in Kansas City, Kansas, called Sumner Academy of Arts and Science. I have called it my Hogwarts before, and I mean that. It was rigorous. It was intense. It asked everything of you academically. But what made Sumner magical was never just the rigor, the ranking, or the history of the building. It was the people who carried it.
Sumner Academy was first known as Sumner High School, named after the abolitionist Charles Sumner. Its history is not simple, but it is essential. Sumner was born out of injustice, after Black students in Kansas City, Kansas, were blocked from attending local high schools by white students and white citizens. In response, the community fought back, lawmakers changed the law, and Sumner became a segregated high school for Black students. Decades later, in 1978, Sumner High School closed under a federally mandated desegregation plan and reopened as Sumner Academy of Arts and Science, a public magnet school for highly motivated and academically talented students.
So when I say Sumner was magic, I do not mean it was fantasy. I mean it was transformation. Sumner was not a private school. It was not a wealthy prep school hidden behind a gate. It was, and is, a public magnet school planted in Wyandotte County. Many of us came from working-class families. Many of us carried realities outside of school that did not always match the level of excellence expected of us inside of it. But Sumner never treated brilliance as something that belonged only to wealthier zip codes. Inside those walls, excellence was expected of us.
The building itself seemed to understand the assignment. Sumner’s Art Deco design, with its geometric patterns, brick, limestone, and bold central tower, made the school feel special without feeling untouchable. It had presence. It had personality. It had history in the walls. It also was not a huge school. My graduating class had around 162 students, and that intimacy shaped everything. You knew people. You knew their gifts. You knew their business. And because we were teenagers, you usually knew a little too much of their business.
But that closeness created something special. I have never seen a school as diverse as Sumner was. We had students from different cultures, neighborhoods, religions, backgrounds, and ways of seeing the world. At times, we even had foreign exchange students, which felt extraordinary to me as a kid from Kansas City, Kansas. Before many of us had the chance to travel the world, the world had somehow found its way into our hallways. The students were brilliant, strange, creative, competitive, funny, awkward, ambitious, and deeply unique. Looking back, I do not think we fully realized what we were surrounded by. Everyone in that school was practically a unicorn. And the teachers were unicorns too.
I had the pleasure of having great relationships with many of my teachers, but there are four who especially stood out to me. Each of them taught me something about what a great school can be.
The first was Becky Thomas, the songstress. It is safe to say that I came into Sumner like a storm, but my first touchdown was in front of my chorale teacher. She had a passion for choral music like none other. She was calm, deeply committed to the craft, and she cared about the way music could make you feel. My first encounter with her was not actually in chorale. It was when I auditioned for the school musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She immediately wanted to recruit me. At the time, I was in orchestra, but I left my cello behind to come sing. And boy, did we sing. We were national winners, and Becky Thomas loved to win. We loved giving her the opportunity to say that we had won.
Speaking of storms, let me talk about the storm that is Kristian Foster-Reynolds. She was my 10th grade American History teacher, and one of the funniest and most eccentric teachers I had. She said desk chairs were bad for you, so she sat on a yoga ball at her desk instead. She always talked to you like a human being. There was no superiority with her. She was approachable, funny, and had a dry humor that was both respectable and endearing. I remember championing for her to become an administrator, which she eventually did. She became vice principal, and I was obsessed. I would casually stop by her office, sometimes just to drop off her mail, because apparently I had appointed myself assistant to the vice principal. She was steady, direct, and ride or die.
I have to talk about my guardian angel: Jamelle Brown. There is no one like her. If you did speech and debate, you knew Jamelle Brown. At the time, we called it forensics, and we took it very seriously. Think of Glee, but a speech team. We were champions too, and our leader was the brilliant Jamelle Brown. She was whimsical, theatrical, fun, free, and full of life. She was mama bear. She let us be free, and because of that, we existed in our own little bubble. If you were looking for one of us, we were more than likely in her room. Mrs. Brown and I are so close that I have attended her family reunion, while I have never even been to my own. At a time in my life when I really needed somewhere and someone to feel like home, she held me and lifted me above the clouds endlessly.
And then there is Cindy Leighton. I had Mrs. Leighton twice, for Spanish and for IB Anthropology, and she kept a box of Froot Loops in her closet just for me. That may sound small, but when you are a teenager trying to figure out who you are, small kindnesses can become sacred. She always encouraged my mind. She knew I did not see the world like everyone else. She knew I was fighting a different fight, and she always told me I could be the impossible. She still tells me that today. Mrs. Leighton embodied the essence of Mother Goose, with her blonde, wavy hair and quirky demeanor. She was safety. You could go to her classroom to focus and settle. It was not too much. It was not too little. It was just enough.
Maybe that is what all four of them gave me in different ways. Mrs. Thomas gave me discipline. Mrs. Foster-Reynolds gave me steadiness. Mrs. Brown gave me freedom. Mrs. Leighton gave me belief. Together, they gave me a blueprint for what education can be when teachers are allowed to be fully human while helping students become fully themselves.
That is what a great public magnet school can do. It does not simply teach you information. It teaches you how to see yourself. Sumner taught me that rigor and belonging do not have to be opposites. In fact, the best schools understand that students rise higher when they know they are seen.
The older I get, the more I understand that Sumner did not just prepare me for college or a career. It prepared me for life. And when I look back, I know the real magic of Sumner was never the building, the ranking, or even the name. It was the people. The teachers who decided I was worth the effort. The teachers who saw me fully and still expected greatness from me. The teachers who handed me no magic wand, but somehow helped me discover my power anyway.
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