Four students from Lawrence High School have earned gold medals from the Scholastic Art Awards, a longstanding national competition for teen artists.
Lawrence High School students shone at the regional stage of the Scholastic Art Awards, with 22 works progressing to the national stage. Todd Poteet, visual arts teacher at LHS said judges reviewed 135,000 works of art at nationals this cycle. The top 1% of pieces received medals.
Among those ranks are LHS gold medalists Leila Albaugh, Wren Jay, Rilo Scholz and Lynorah Roberts.
“LHS has a long standing tradition of excellence in the visual arts,” Poteet wrote. “Each year students are encouraged to compete in various state, regional and national competitions. Consistently, LHS students have been recipients of the most prestigious awards in the nation.”
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He said Albaugh, Jay, Scholz and Roberts are standouts with extraordinary dedication and work ethic.
Jay is a junior who will be traveling to New York City to study at Pratt Institute this summer. Roberts, a sophomore, will travel to Chicago for a summer institute in the arts.
Albaugh is a senior who will attend the University of Kansas in the fall to study architecture. She won a gold medal for her painting entitled “Beneath Your Maturity.”
“This painting was … related to my childhood, and just the process of growing up and missing that sort of innocence of childhood, and just all along wanting to reconnect with that and just be back to what it used to be before life got so intense and mature and everything,” she said.
Albaugh was able to recapture a childlike sense of whimsy in the more than 100 hours she spent laboring over the piece. Though the majority of the work is paint, she created the background drawing with crayons.
“I thought it was so much fun to just use crayons and do little kid drawings like I used to all the time when I was younger,” she said.
Albaugh said she had painted and created throughout her life, but she began to paint more seriously on canvases her sophomore year of high school. She anticipates college will keep her busy, but she wants to keep painting in her free time as a creative outlet.
She said winning a gold medal in the Scholastic competition was a huge accomplishment.
“It’s really nice to be recognized for something that I’ve worked so hard on,” Albaugh said. “And it’s just validating to know that hard work does pay off and that you will kind of see results from what you do and what you work hard on.”
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Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.
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