Katie Dehmlow’s balancing act demonstrates her amazing versatility both on the beam and in life.
Photo by Rebecca Holt
Senior Katie Dehmlow is a supergirl in her own right, somehow balancing schoolwork, sports, and involvement in her youth-group community outreaches, while still finding time to re-kindle her passion for art.
With a full schedule consisting of AP classes such as Psychology and Calculus, along with Honors Physics and an Anatomy class, Dehmlow finds stress relief in her art class. “I finally got to take an art class, so it’s okay. I really like drawing and painting,” Dehmlow said.
Outside of school, Dehmlow spends a lot of her time with her youth group and her church. “My mom is the leader of the church youth-group and so are my brothers and I,” said Dehmlow. “Everyone who lives in our house is really involved with church stuff because our church is very open and it’s kind of like a big family.” Dehmlow grew up with four brothers (one of them being her twin) and one sister. All of her siblings before her graduated from TJ. “My oldest brother is 37 and the youngest brother is 16.”
Even though she’s lived in Denver for all of her life, Katie travels north and south of the U.S. borders on mission trips with her youth-group.
“We go on mission trips every summer. We’ve gone to Mexico, Canada, Montana and Arizona. We go with this organization called YouthWorks,” said Dehmlow. “We go for a week, and two days out of the week you are working with kids, doing activities like making crafts, playing sports, just hanging out with them because most of the kids are underprivileged and don’t have good home lives at all. They’re living in poverty.”
The group also does various odd jobs and even helps build homes from the ground up. “The other two days you do manual labor, like in Mexico we would be literally building peoples’ houses out of cinder blocks because there is no building code there,” Dehmlow explained. “At the Indian reservations we’ve gone to, we worked on peoples’ barns and helped them fix up their houses and do a lot of painting.”
This past summer Dehmlow got a chance to go to Vancouver, Canada. “We went to Vancouver for Kids Club. Some of us worked at a summer camp that was all summer long, and we did things like tutoring and go on field trips,” said Dehmlow. “All of the kids are in foster care, so they were really underprivileged, and a lot of them had problems just from growing up with unstable home lives, so it was really cool to take them on field trips and give them the opportunity to do things they normally didn’t get to do. The other groups went to work with homeless people in downtown Vancouver. They spent the entire days giving out lunches, speaking with the homeless, hearing life-changing stories, and even sometimes getting the homeless to enlist in rehab programs.”
After venturing to Canada, Katie traveled to Montana and visited a Cherokee Indian reservation. “In Montana we just hung out with them for a day. For work crew, most of us painted houses,” said Dehmlow. “My group helped an elderly couple fix their corral because the fence was broken and their cows were escaping through the hole.”
Even with her hectic schedule, Dehmlow still finds time to get involved with in-school activities and community outreaches. She is a part of the TJ National Honor Society (NHS), Peace Panel, swims and dives for the swimming team, and competes with the TJ Gymnastics squad. “This year I’m going to do track, and if not track I’ll do tennis,” said Dehmlow.
After high school, Dehmlow plans on attending CU Boulder and enrolling in medical school. “Most people wouldn’t really gather that [her going to medical school], from any of the stuff that I do,” said Dehmlow. “I mostly want to go to med school just because I’ve always been good at paying attention to detail, and I like blood and gore. None of that has ever grossed me out; it’s actually kind of interesting to me.”
When she’s not managing a busy schedule, Dehmlow likes to take time and lose herself in her art, and is currently trying to refresh her guitar skills.
“I really don’t know how I balance it all,” Dehmlow says about her busy schedule. “When you have that much going on you go with the flow. You learn that scheduling things…that’s way overrated. Anytime you plan anything it’s not going to work out.”
“Katie is an extremely artistic and creative student,” said Eileen Adair, Dehmlow’s Creative Writing teacher. “I always look forward to seeing what she’ll come up with next.”
