Kyla Margaret Burton, a teacher who mined for jewels in the heart of every child, died suddenly and unexpectedly Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025, from complications of influenza and pneumonia. She was 57.
In her final months of life, she hiked a dozen rugged miles to see one of earth’s most beautiful places, home to the Havasupai, guardians of the Grand Canyon. She hated to camp, but she slept in a tent by sheer cliffs and flood-prone waters and then hiked a dozen more miles to check a box on her husband’s bucket list and to spend time with her daughter and future son-in-law.
In her final weeks of life, she cracked open a new textbook to complete a master’s degree in early learning with an emphasis on literacy and reading. She had paused this paper-chase to give birth, nurturing Blake and Adria at home as her husband of 36 years, Gregory, steered the family down journalism’s hard road with stops in Idaho, Utah, Delaware, California and Arizona (she stopped in California).
She was an “OG” spouse of a journalist, one friend said.
In her final days of life, she got out of bed at 5 a.m. to prepare for school at John F. Kennedy Elementary in Indio, Calif. Under a tree by the playground, she picked radishes with her students. Just as she had done at home with her own children, Kyla planted and tended a vegetable garden for her class.
Children of the digital age, she believed, had lost touch with and needed to learn the life cycle of seed, soil, water and sun and the genesis and rebirth of food from nature. After harvest, students kept watch over a pumpkin under glass as mold and decay returned it to water and earth. At the end, she and the children ate salted pumpkin seeds she baked at home.
Days before she died, Kyla picked out the shoes Adria will wear to match a wedding gown they both adored. In her final hours, she smiled and talked about Adria and Nathan’s upcoming spring wedding, an event that will close an important chapter of her own circle of life a little more than a year after Blake and his wife, Natalie, exchanged vows.
Her heart was filled with joy.
Born two days after Christmas in 1967, Kyla was the youngest child of Larry Torvil BeVan and Donna Belle (Davie) BeVan. They lived in the fertile cradle of Moscow Mountain and Paradise Ridge. Their pond, when it overflowed, sent water to a creek that spills into the South Fork of the Palouse River, which joins the Snake which joins the Columbia before it empties into the Pacific Ocean.
She grew up surrounded by hay, lentils and wheat at the base of a hill outside Moscow. Bounded by modest dresses and long hair, strictures of Larry and Donna’s faith, Kyla made do with blonde braids and rubber boots, gathering eggs and raising bunnies in the shadow of a Gothic-arch barn. Larry and Donna collected dogs, cats, goats, chickens, ducks, bunnies, cows and horses. Ike, a retired thoroughbred, mistook dirt roads near their home for the backstretch at Santa Anita. Riding bareback, Kyla skirted ditches and fence posts, her firm grip on the reins. In summer, Kyla rode the family’s horses over Moscow Mountain to pasture. In winter, she skated on their frozen pond and sailed down the surrounding hills on truck inner tubes and toboggans. She reflected often on a trip that opened her eyes to the world beyond rural America. On a six-week, 10,000-mile road trip in 1981, Kyla, Donna, brother Erik, their mother’s childhood friend, her husband, their four children and Donna’s childhood teacher piled into a Dodge van pulling a heavy camper. They drove down to Texas, over to south Florida, up to Washington, D.C., and New York City, further up to Chicoutimi, Quebec, and back home across the northern plains. They cooked and slept in the camper.
When her older siblings, Torvil, Leah and Erik, aged out of less-skilled farm work, Kyla mowed the lawn and took a job with her father cleaning saw blades for dimes. Sawyers from the forests of Idaho and Washington trusted Larry to sharpen the tools of their life’s work. Her father called her “Babe” and she relished trips to town in his pickup to call on chefs in need of sharp knives.
Frugal and discerning, Kyla saved enough dimes to buy a used VW Rabbit. Licensed at 14, she thrived on the independence of driving. She earned dollars instead of dimes by taking a job cleaning apartments left in shambles by college students at semester’s end. She got jobs at Zip’s Drive-In and Skippers Seafood and Chowder House and Alex’s Mexican eatery and Biscuitroot restaurant and U-Haul and Sherwin-Williams Paints and Gritman Medical Center and a dentist’s office, earning enough money for college and a teaching degree from the University of Idaho.
Teaching was in her blood. Kyla’s mother, Donna, taught elementary school for a short time in Potlatch. Kyla took her middle name from her grandmother, Margaret, a lifelong educator who read to Kyla nearly every day, so much so that Kyla’s kindergarten teacher blanched when on the first day of school she flawlessly read entire story books. There is a street in Salmon, Idaho, named for Margaret, a beloved teacher who opened a one-room schoolhouse in Shoup, Idaho, before moving to Salmon and finally to Boise.
When she was in high school, one of Kyla’s teachers from her days at Moscow’s J. Russell School, asked Kyla to volunteer in her classroom, a gesture Kyla often pointed to as instrumental in her life. In 1992, Kyla graduated with a degree in elementary education. She completed student teaching in Deary and took her first professional job at A. B. McDonald elementary in Moscow.
By then, Kyla had married a man she met at Alex’s in Pullman. She was a waitress and he was a bartender. On breaks, they snuck away for lattes and bean soup at the Combine on Main Street. He rode his motorcycle across state lines to court her before moving to Moscow, ditching pretense and saving gasoline. In 1988, they were married in a church on a rainy evening in Newport Hills, Wash. The young couple honeymooned for one night in a Seattle hotel.
Kyla urged her husband, an introspective student, to pick one career, any one, and he chose journalism. A teacher married to a reporter in those years pooled just above Idaho’s poverty line, even with second jobs on nights and weekends. Kyla earned considerably more than her husband as he worked his way from the Palouse Journal to the Lewiston Morning Tribune to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Thanks to her financial savvy and a banking system organized around cash tips, white envelopes and a sock drawer, they bought their first home on Veatch Street. Under Kyla’s direction, they restored a gambrel-roofed house whose red fir floors and leaded windows had suffered years of neglect.
In 1996 at Gritman, the same hospital where she was born, Kyla gave birth to Blake. She worked on her feet until the day doctors induced her labor.
A few months later, Kyla moved the family to Salt Lake City after Greg landed a job with the Salt Lake Tribune. In a brick bungalow on Browning Avenue, she restored oak floors and door frames with bullseye molding. She opened a home daycare, rearing her blue-eyed boy alongside other people’s children. In 2000, she gave birth to Adria, her tow-headed daughter and constant companion. She planted shade and fruit trees, sage, mint, bleeding hearts, hostas, hydrangeas and a backyard vegetable garden. The kids planted and tended their own edible greens, collecting snails and roly polies while Kyla troweled the soil.
Like far too many women, after carrying babies to term, Kyla had unplanned, emergency cesarean sections. During her months of recovery, Kyla read with her children, immersed them in arts and crafts, taught them to be independent and cultivated their curiosity. She played the violin as a young girl. On an upright grand piano that stood prominently in all of her homes, she encouraged her children to explore the keys.
In Salt Lake, Blake and then Adria enrolled in preschool at Kearns-Saint Ann, founded as an orphanage in 1891. After securing her Utah license, Kyla taught at Saint Ann. The family moved again when Gregory was recruited to join The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal. As the miles from family grew, the couple made a deal: Kyla, Blake and Adria would spend summers in Idaho and Arizona so a growing pack of cousins could explore mountains and forests and deserts. In Delaware, Kyla secured yet another license. After first volunteering in her children’s classrooms, Kyla took long-term substitute teaching positions at Olive B. Loss Elementary in Bear and Townsend Early Childhood Center in the Appoquinimink School District.
She found kindred spirits at OBL, a diverse school with high aspirations for every student. In this environment, teachers and parents formed lifelong bonds. Kyla took Blake to Odyssey of the Mind competitions and chaperoned Adria on trips to Chesapeake Bay with other young girls and their mothers. From the blackberry and sweetgum tree swamp behind their house, she called Blake and Adria home with a two-fingered “Papa Whistle,” modeled on her father’s. She drove the kids to piano lessons and concerts and sleepovers and libraries and museums and beaches and parks. She planted a vegetable garden and lamb’s ear and crocus and daffodils and rosemary and lavender and nasturtium and dogwoods and maples.
In 2011, Gregory was recruited to be editor of The (Palm Springs) Desert Sun and the family moved to La Quinta, Calif. Kyla worked as a substitute while securing a teaching certificate from California. She acquired licenses from four states over the years, mastering conflicting standards and overlapping prerequisites. In the desert, she found another close cohort of loyal teacher friends. She taught kindergarten at Lyndon B. Johnson and kindergarten and transitional kindergarten at John F. Kennedy in the Desert Sands Unified School District. She was named Teacher of the Year for her school in 2023. Plants, pictures and progress sheets filled her classroom. If ever a student misbehaved, Kyla’s class intervened. “Oh no,” they would say. “We don’t do that in Mrs. Burton’s class.”
In her application for a master’s degree, Kyla called schools “a wellspring of growth for a community.”
“I work at a Title 1 school where I am often a child’s first experience with school,” she wrote. “From an early age, I was interested in learning about and celebrating cultures other than my own. My family hosted and socialized with visitors from India, South Korea, South Africa, and Nigeria. I have been an English language tutor for families from Costa Rica and India.”
Recently, she’d made contact with distant relatives from Norway and had begun to stitch her family’s origins together with stories of its immigration. In 2023, she took her first trip outside North America. In Oslo, Bergen and Voss she saw herself in the faces and mannerisms of women drinking coffee, walking to the fjords and shopping along the harbors. She was greeted in Norwegian before people realized she didn’t speak the language. In Voss, she found deep green farmland and a barn on a hillside near her ancestral home. For the first time in her life, she said, she felt like an insider.
More than anything, Kyla believed in doing the right thing for the right reason. She loved unconditionally but expected your best. She never once made anyone feel like they should be anything other than who they are. When times were tough, she’d damn the bureaucracy. But, if tensions rose too high, she looked for the right moment to drop a sarcastic gem followed by a belly laugh. Her wit endeared family and friends.
Quick to blush, she avoided flattery. After winning Teacher of the Year, she declined to compete at district and state levels, preferring to join union teammates who hopped in a car to deliver awards in person to other winners.
She would not be fussed over and asked to be cremated, her ashes buried beside her father on the crest of a hill, among a knot of yellow pines with a view of that Gothic-arch barn and a rolling checkerboard of fields, yellow canola, blue flax, golden wheat and a billion white blossoms floating on sea-green rows of peas and lentils.
Kyla is survived by her mother Donna BeVan, of Moscow, husband Gregory Burton, of La Quinta and Phoenix, son Blake Burton and his wife Natalie, of Phoenix, daughter Adria Burton and her fiance Nathan Tausch, of Oceano, Calif., brother Torvil BeVan and his wife Nancy, of Viola, sister Leah Mahaffy and her husband Steve, of Phoenix, brother Erik BeVan and his partner Lara Taggart, of Cave Creek, Ariz., father-in-law Harold Burton and his wife Jeanette, of Lilliwaup, Wash., brother-in-law Steven Burton and his wife Michele Carrier, of Pittsburgh, brother-in-law Scott Burton and his wife Ann, of Prosper, Texas, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews and cousins, and countless friends, students and families whose lives she touched with a smile and invocation: “Welcome to our school.”
Memorial services will be planned for the spring in the Coachella Valley and in the summer in Idaho. Details will be shared when they are complete. The family has created a scholarship fund for aspiring teachers at the University of Idaho. To honor Kyla’s memory, family ask that donations be made in Kyla’s name to:
Kyla M. Burton Memorial Elementary Education Scholarship Endowment, The University of Idaho Foundation, Inc., 875 Perimeter Drive MS 3143 Moscow, ID 83844-3143.
At this link on the university’s giving page, giving.uidaho.edu/forms/donate, you can type “Kyla” in the search field to find her scholarship and use a credit card to make a donation. Or, you can make checks payable to the University of Idaho Foundation, Inc., and specify “Kyla M. Burton Scholarship Endowment” in the memo line or a brief cover letter. Donations also may be made over the phone at (208) 885-4000.
