MARYSVILLE — If you think your high school years were tough, imagine trying to balance classes with supporting yourself and your family.

Rachel Kalma, now 20 years old, is in her senior year at Marysville Mountain View High School. She’s raising a two-year-old daughter, and recently lost both her mother and her grandmother to cancer.

Even as she copes with these difficulties, those who know her at Mountain View commend her for her academic performance and the other traits they believe make her a positive role model for her peers.

Kalma was the daughter of a single mother, and started working at the age of 14 to help support her family. Her jobs included three years at the concession stands of the Evergreen State Fairgrounds in Monroe, followed by almost two years at Paula’s Hallmark in Everett, where she worked until she was almost nine months pregnant. After a period of being a stay-at-home mom, she returned to school in September of 2008.

Kalma first came to Mountain View in 2004, and in that time, she’s attended four leadership classes, organized three food drives and a number of holiday parties, taken part in a Hurricane Katrina relief project and a number of school assemblies, and tended to the school campus in ways ranging from picking up trash to laying down bark in the flower beds. She has also helped out in the same school daycare that her daughter has used, and her ultimate goal is to become a registered nurse. She credited the many doctor’s appointments she went to, after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, with giving her information and interest in the field. She also cited the Mountain View business classes she took as building her strength and ability to work well with a variety of people.

“I came to this school with very little ambition and no goals,” Kalma said. “I had never really thought before about what I wanted to do in life. I was hanging out with the wrong kids, and needed to pull my life together, or I would be no one.”

When Kalma dropped out of school after her pregnancy, she realized that she would need an education to take care of herself and her child. She expressed her gratitude to Mountain View teachers like Jay Belan for giving her the confidence and knowledge to succeed. She again pointed to her business courses as a source of practical skills, that she can apply toward obtaining part-time jobs. She will need all the help she can get on the financial front, since she found herself living with a cousin after the the deaths of her mother and grandmother, and she’ll need to find a way of supporting herself and her child, even as she hopes to attend four years of college.

Belan has expressed his faith in Kalma’s problem-solving skills. He described her as a motivated, self-directed learner who’s among “the upper 10 percent of her peers” and “a natural leader.” He praised her for serving as a mentor to other students and instilling “a positive attitude that is infectious to those around her.” He acknowledged that there have been “periods of time when circumstances didn’t allow for her to be in school,” but he lauded her dedication to getting her diploma and fulfilling her goals, in spite of the hurdles she’s faced.

“Rachel’s word is good when it comes to doing what she says she will do,” Belan said. “She’s a good communicator and she uses this skill in making the adjustments and exhibiting the flexibility that it often takes to work with classmates in a productive manner.”

Belan characterized Kalma as “a young lady who has lived a lot in her short span of years,” which he believes she has used, without even realizing it, to influence her fellow students for the better, since she’s already experienced a number of the situations that present themselves to her younger peers.