Meet Kaleena

If you had told me 10 years ago that one day I would be running for the Macon County Board of Education, I would have laughed at you. This was never part of some big political plan. In fact, politics has never been what this is about for me. To understand how I got here, you really have to understand where I came from. I was born and raised in Macon County, and my roots run pretty deep in these mountains. I come from people who knew how to work hard. My Mamaw and Papaw Keener opened and operated Sugartown Donuts. My Pa Allen helped construct I-40 through Haywood County. My Nana was a homemaker who took care of her family and made sure every one of us stayed in line. I grew up around people who didn't talk much about hard work because they were too busy doing it. You took care of your family, helped your neighbors, worked for what you had, and did what needed to be done. I carried a lot of that with me to Franklin High School. I played softball, served as team captain, and was involved in FFA and VICA. Through VICA, I competed and won at the state level twice. I was competitive, independent, curious, determined and probably a little hardheaded. I wanted to know how things worked, I wasn't afraid of a challenge, and if I decided I was going to do something, I usually found a way to do it. Looking back now, I guess some things haven't changed much. I started working for the U.S. Forest Service at 15 through its student summer program and spent five summers doing the kind of work that stays with you. If you've ever sat beside the Nantahala River, hiked a section of the Appalachian or Bartram Trail, or enjoyed some of the public lands tucked into these mountains, there's a pretty good chance teenage Kaleena was somewhere around there once, probably with a shovel, a Pulaski, or a weedeater in her hand. It was hard, dirty, physical work, and I loved it. Those summers gave me something much bigger than a paycheck. There is a different kind of pride that comes from driving past a place years later and knowing your own two hands helped build it, maintain it, or leave it better than you found it. After high school, I went to Haywood Community College and earned my degree in horticulture. I took something I loved and turned it into a career, eventually building my own landscaping business and spending nearly 20 years doing work that required me to solve problems, work with people, adapt when things didn't go according to plan, and figure things out as I went. For a long time, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what my life was going to look like. Then I became a mom. Motherhood changed me, but becoming the mother of a child with profound disabilities changed the entire direction of my life. Suddenly I was navigating healthcare, therapies, disability services, IEPs, special education and systems I had never given much thought to until my child depended on me understanding them. I had to learn, so I did. I also learned pretty quickly that I'm not very good at accepting, "that's just the way it is." If you hand me a 100-page document, I'm probably going to be the person who gets to page 87, finds the sentence everyone else skipped over, and starts asking questions about it. I want to understand how things work and why. If something doesn't make sense, I dig until it does. If one answer creates three more questions, I'm probably going to ask those too. I don't expect to know everything, but I will put in the work to understand the things that matter. At first, I learned because my own child needed me to. Eventually, I realized how many other parents were sitting at those same tables trying to understand the same complicated systems, often feeling like they were supposed to somehow already know how all of it worked. So I started helping them too. That journey led me into advocacy and family support work, where the things life had taught me became something I could use to help another family find their footing and their voice. Today, I'm continuing to build on that work as I pursue my national certification as a Family Support Partner. Somewhere along the way, I also stopped looking only at what was happening to one child or one family and started looking at the bigger picture. Why are we doing things this way? Who made that decision? What does the law actually say? What does board policy say? Where does the money come from? Where can it be spent? What opportunities are we leaving on the table? What are we doing well, and where can we do better? The more I learned, the more meetings I attended, the more parents and teachers I listened to, and the more policies, budgets, statutes and plans I read, the harder it became to believe my only role should be standing on the outside asking somebody else to make things better. At some point, I had to ask myself a different question: If I believe so strongly that things can be better, am I willing to step up and help do the work? And that's how someone who would have laughed at the idea 10 years ago ended up putting her name on the ballot for the Macon County Board of Education. Not because I suddenly became interested in politics. Because I became deeply interested in our schools, in the decisions being made for our children, in the people making those decisions, and in whether we are doing everything we can with what we have. When I look back now, maybe the road here isn't quite as unexpected as I once thought. I was raised by people who taught me that hard work matters. I learned young that I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. I've built a business, raised children, fought for my own child, stood beside other families, and learned that sometimes making a difference starts with being willing to ask one more question. This has never been about politics for me. It's about doing the work. It's about listening before making decisions, asking questions when something doesn't make sense, and understanding what I'm voting on instead of simply accepting what I'm told. If that means reading all 100 pages to find the detail buried on page 87, that's exactly what I'll do. If I don't know the answer, I'll say I don't know, and then I'll go find it. And when a parent, teacher, staff member, student or member of this community comes to the board with something that matters to them, I want them to know they were actually heard. That's who I've always been, long before I ever thought about running for office. And that's the kind of board member I will be.