As Kimball Area High School (KAHS) reopened Wednesday, Leon Hutton made it his priority to get away from the comfort of his office to mingle with the students. He is the new guidance counselor at KAHS and strongly believes that the best way for him to succeed in his job is by making sure the students know him. “I go out there and get to know the students so that they are comfortable with me and will come and talk to me,” he said. Being a guidance counselor is something Hutton knows well. Before moving to Kimball in July, he was a guidance counselor for 27 years at a high school and middle school in Garden City, Kan. He knows the importance of his role well. “When a student has any personal problems with their friends or family or teachers, I try to help them overcome it,” Hutton said. “When something is wrong with those (areas in their lives), their learning is affected.” One of the primary reasons Hutton chose to leave Kansas for a job in Kimball was so that his fiancee, who is from this area, would be closer to home. After finding out about the job opening at KAHS, he traveled here during the spring and met with principal Karen Imholte. Later, when he was back in Garden City, KAHS c1onducted an interview with him over the phone and he was offered the job. As guidance counselor, he will have the responsibility of ensuring that seniors have enough credits for graduation. He will work with ACT tests, state testings and college entrance exams. He will also help students obtain financial aid for college. There are several differences, though, between his current job and his last one. For one thing, Kimball is a much smaller town than Garden City. Located in the southwest corner of Kansas, the city’s population is approximately 30,000. Furthermore, at the middle school in Garden City, Hutton worked with students in grades 7 and 8. At KAHS he will be in charge of students in grades seven through 12. That may sound as though Hutton will have to work with a lot more students than he’s used to, but in truth, the student population in KAHS is much smaller. Thus, he will be dealing with roughly the same number of students in KAHS as he did in Kansas. “We had 520 students in the middle school that I worked in,” Hutton said. “Here, the whole school has only 412 students in it.” As far as getting used to living in a much smaller town, he has no problem. “It has not been hard to adapt to Kimball because I was raised in a small town in Oklahoma that would make Kimball seem large in comparison,” Hutton said. ” There were only eight kids in my graduating class.” Besides that, he has received positive vibes from all the people he’s met in school. Hutton is the new basketball coach for the KAHS seventh-graders and met up with some of the players before school began Wednesday. “They are just really super kids,” he said. “The community we came from in Kansas was pretty rough and there were a lot of gangs.” As for now, one of the first things he is going to do is make sure seniors have the credits necessary for graduation. He has also planned a Sept. 27 field trip for the juniors to visit the College of St. Benedict for a College Career Day. “They (the juniors) have big decisions to make in the next few years,” Hutton added.
