If there is a prom queen in Emporia, it is Kyla Sheldon. The Emporia High School prom Saturday night will mark the ninth attended by the 18-year-old senior.
Sheldon, the daughter of EHS Principal Scott Sheldon, has been going to proms since she was in first grade in Pratt and her father was principal at Pratt Skyline High School.
“It’s been kind of a fun thing that we’ve done,” Scott Sheldon said, seeming a little rueful at using the past tense.
The details of her first prom date have faded from memory.
“I don’t even remember, it was so long ago,” Kyla Sheldon said.
She remembers the tradition, though. The Sheldon family had a routine for prom night.
“We’d go out to eat as a family, the whole family,” she said. Then she and her father would go on to the dance together.
“I always dressed up in my nicest clothes,” she recalled.
One year her dress was more formal, when an EHS teacher, Judy Tibbetts, was sewing her own daughter’s wedding dress and had enough fabric to make a long white gown with lavender cummerbund for Kyla’s trip to the prom, Scott Sheldon said.
The father and daughter would have their photograph taken together like the other couples, and before her mother, Michelle, picked her up to go home, they sometimes danced a little. And Scott Sheldon is, she said, an “all right” dancer.
The youngster enjoyed accompanying her father to the prom.
“It made me feel older, like I was one of the big kids,” she said. “I remember it made me feel really special and important. ... I was always just really excited.”
Kyla stopped accompanying her father to prom when she was in the eighth grade, “so it would be more special when I went by myself,” she said.
When she resumed attending proms last year, she took another date. This year, she and Eric Reimer will go to the dance together.
“We’re going out to eat with friends,” she said. “We’re going to have a big cook-out kind of thing.”
The group of about 20 teens and their parents will gather at one of the homes, with food being brought in by the parents. It will be a casual meal, with the young people changing clothes at the home afterwards.
“We’re taking pictures altogether, too, in somebody’s back yard,” she said.
Kyla Sheldon is confident that she’ll have a good time, despite having left her father behind for a younger man. She looks back fondly on the times her father escorted her to the prom.
“He was a great date,” she said.