When you’re out sick from school, things can get pretty quiet. Your teacher might send home some assignments. A friend might call to check in.
But when fourth-grader Kaia Julka got sick last year, the whole Columbus Academy community—faculty and staff, parents and students, and even recent graduates—rallied to support her.
Connect with the Columbus you don’t know. Subscribe to Columbus Monthly’s weekly Top Reads newsletter.
In the last weeks of third grade, Kaia was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, a rare and life-threatening condition in which her bone marrow suddenly stopped producing blood cells. She left school to begin treatment, requiring a bone marrow transplant for a cure.
Almost immediately, the school nurses stepped into action, hosting school-wide drives to find a stem cell donor. Because only 8 percent of those in the national bone marrow registry are Asian and Kaia is of mixed-Asian heritage, testing as many people as possible offered the best chance of finding her a match.
Within weeks, Academy hosted four drive-through screening events, taking cheek swabs of hundreds of potential donors from the Academy community. Students too young to donate held handmade posters with encouraging messages.
Kaia’s classroom also showed up. Her teachers sent her schoolwork home and included cards and drawings from classmates with every delivery. “We sent her little gifts—a squishmallow, her favorite lip balm—just to let her know we were thinking of her,” says Kaia’s third-grade teacher, Beth Klug. They made videos to say they missed her and Zoomed her into activities. “I think including her on a regular basis made it less scary for everybody,” Klug says.
In June, a matching bone marrow donor arrived, and Academy’s support turned celebratory. Even though school was out for the summer, the school organized a parade in front Kaia’s house, driving by with messages like “Be Brave!” and “You Go Girl!” This send-off buoyed the whole family as they headed to Cincinnati for weeks to stay in the hospital during the transplant.
Throughout this ordeal, Kaia longed to return to school. “No. 1, always, since the start of this whole thing, was to get back to Columbus Academy,” says her mother, Courtney Kauh. In March, Kaia was strong enough to rejoin her now fourth-grade classmates. “They made her return feel so special. She said she felt like a celebrity,” Kauh says.
Mark Hansen, the head of Academy’s lower school, explains, “With 1,150 kids of all ages on one campus, everybody has an active part in each other’s lives.”
“Columbus Academy is a community where the people take serious care of one another. It shows up in so many ways,” says Kaia’s father, AJ Julka. “It’s one of the reasons we chose Academy for Kaia in the first place.”
This story appeared in the May 2026 issue of Columbus Monthly. Subscribe here.
This article originally appeared on Columbus Monthly: A Third Grader’s School Community Helped Her Overcome a Rare Illness
Reporting by Amy Bodiker Baskes, Columbus Monthly / Columbus Monthly
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
