Ridgeline: Kharma Gentry, guided by optimism, overcomes instability to enroll at WSU

“The best thing I can say is get involved and make an effort to be optimistic in all that you’re doing at school.”

These no-nonsense words of advice come straight from lived experience. At Ridgeline High School, “involved” would be an understatement to describe Kharma Gentry.

Gentry is in color guard in the marching band. She also plays the trumpet. She’s the co-founder and current president of a podcast club, although she says she doesn’t get the chance to listen to a lot of podcasts on her schedule. She interviews members across the community from students, teachers and superintendents to members of the Lands Council.

She loves to write – sometimes horror stories. She knows she wants to be a creative writer no matter what else she does in her career. Some of her favorite subjects are psychology and sociology (and how they work together), but she also has a passion for computer science – she codes for fun.

Gentry wasn’t always the most outgoing but that began to change as she entered her freshman year. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, her entire first year of high school was online.

“It was hard to be social in that sense, but it was a good transitioning period where I could start talking to people without needing to have those face-to-face interactions,” Gentry said.

She made it her goal to become more social throughout high school and she wanted the opportunity to meet people, so she set about joining clubs and school activities.

Keeping busy was an essential tool for Gentry, not just for connecting to her community, but also for dealing with instability at home. Throughout the first three years of high school, Gentry faced regular relocations to the homes of various family members and friends.

“My primary way of coping with all the stress and all of the instability that was going on at home was always to throw myself into school,” Gentry said.

In her junior year, she made the decision to seek a more stable housing situation and live independently from her parents.

Gentry also has a younger sister, and it was through her trusted science teacher that they connected with Renee Brubaker. The teacher approached the Brubaker household because of their experience hosting international exchange students.

“She reached out to us to ask if we had ever been open to taking in a student from the school, not an exchange student. We had never, because we didn’t know that was something to do,” Brubaker said.

After an initial meeting, the sisters moved in with the Brubaker family and have been there for nearly a year. It’s been a year of getting to know one another, building trust and adjusting to life in a safe environment. This includes exploring new opportunities for emotional processing.

“Renee is just the most understanding person and just sits there and listens and lets me just cry and panic. … And that’s something that just having a safe home to do that in has really helped me with,” Gentry said.

Gentry wants to share her experience of homelessness because she wants more people to know that it can happen, in sometimes nearly invisible ways, to young people like her.

“I believe I still technically classify as homeless in the sense of I’m not living with a relative,” she said.

After her years cultivating relationships and clubs at Ridgeline, soon Gentry will expand her community even further at Washington State University.

With so many passions and interests to choose from, she hasn’t chosen her major just yet. First , Gentry says, she is teaching herself to cook.

“I am super excited to just meet a new group of people,” she said, “get some fresh minds, all that kind of stuff.”