Kyla Guilford is a WYWLA senior who embodies our creed and shows up “Ready to Learn, Ready to Lead and Ready to Serve” each and every day.  Kyla serves as our student body president.  She is a member and leader in several other school clubs, including Junior Civitan and National Honor Society.  Kyla also serves as co-captain of the Broughton High School varsity track and field team.  Outside of school, Kyla is dedicated to her service in the Girl Scouts where she is pursuing her Gold Award.  Kyla balances her academics, athletics and service with a commitment to volunteering through Activate Good and developing community-building activities as a YMCA Teen Advisory Council Member.  Starting in her 9th grade year, she also completed an internship at the North Carolina Business Committee of Education where she performed outreach to students and educators across the state for the “Ready, Set, App” competition.  Through a separate experience with the City of Raleigh Summer Youth Employment Program, Kyla worked to create an app to help increase the financial livelihoods for single black mothers.

This summer Kyla was selected to attend the prestigious North Carolina Governor’s School in the area of Social Sciences.  Kyla is in the thick of college and scholarship application season, and her dream is to attend a top university to study biomedical engineering or psychology.  Kyla was a WYWLA school nominee for the UNC Chapel Hill Morehead-Cain Scholarship, and she is a semi-finalist for the national Coca-Cola Scholars Award.

On main campus, Kyla took a variety of advanced courses, and she carefully selected her electives to prepare for classes at SAU.  In particular, Kyla enjoyed Speech and Yearbook because she found them to be great outlets for creatively expressing herself.

Kyla has been a student with us since the 6th grade, and her teachers love her for her insightful contributions to class discussions, her intellectual curiosity and her willingness to always help her peers.  Kyla shared that she most loves the sisterhood and sense of community that she has always felt at WYWLA.

We know that this OWL is going to fly high, and we look forward to following Kyla through her senior year as she earns college acceptances and scholarship offers!