Sage Barney was offered a choice not often afforded to high-schoolers her age.
See, her family had been living in Michigan, but moved to her grandparents’ house in LaHarpe in the fall of 2020, when schools there announced they’d remain closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
By last fall, the worst of the pandemic had passed. Her high school in Chelsea, on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, had reopened its doors.
Sage’s parents, Ryan and Amber Barney, asked if she’d rather return to Michigan for her senior year, or wrap up her high school education at Iola High School, and continue staying as a family with her grandparents, Harry and Joyce Lee.
It was an easy decision.
“I enjoyed high school here more,” Barney said. “It’s a smaller school that makes it feel like you have a more personal connection with all of your teachers. I liked the friends I was making here.”
Barney is one of six IHS seniors ready to graduate as class valedictorians for the Class of 2022, having maintained a 4.0 grade-point average.
GETTING adjusted to new schools is nothing new for Barney. With her father in the Air Force, she attended schools in Italy (preschool through first grade), Germany (grades 2-7), then Michigan for grades 8-10 and now Iola.
All along, Barney kept high expectations for herself.
“I don’t procrastinate,” she said. “That stresses me out. And I put in effort when I do homework. That’s where you learn.”
That love of learning will suit her well in the fall, when Barney enrolls at Brigham Young University as an engineering student.
“I like math,” she explained. “For some reason, math comes easy to me. I like solving problems, and really like helping people. And I’ve always found physics interesting, like my grandpa.”
BARNEY made sure to cram an awful lot into her high school schedule, including volleyball, basketball, cross country, track and field, soccer, choir and powerlifting — more on that later — as well as several clubs from the National Honor Society, Students Against Destructive Decisions, Kansas Association of Youth (KAY) Club and the Phi Theta Kappa sorority.
On top of that, Barney also was required to complete Bible study every morning before school, necessary to earn an endorsement from a seminary teacher in order to gain admittance into BYU.
“There wasn’t a lot of spare time,” she said, noting she eschewed volleyball and basketball this year because of the time commitment.
But those sacrifices allowed her to participate in cross country in the fall and powerlifting in the winter, “which I loved.”
With minimal exposure to the sport, Barney wound up taking third in her weight class at a state meet.
“I thought it would be fun to lift with other people,” she said. “And I really liked my coach (Mike Wilhelm.)
