Impacting Lives through Dance and Art: Rehle Higham Scholarship
To honor her 50 years of teaching art and dance, former students of Rehle Higham established the Rehle Higham Legacy Art and Dance Scholarship at Shelley High School. The scholarship fund will now be managed by the Idaho Community Foundation.
Teaching in her backyard studio in Shelley, Rehle Higham influenced thousands of southeast Idaho students. Her 8-week ballroom dance and etiquette classes were especially popular. They always concluded with a fancy dinner and dance during which students would perform in front of their parents. She passed away in March 2022.
As former student Curtis Olachea wrote in a letter to Mrs. Higham in 2014: “I want to thank you for the impact you had on my life. You taught me many things, but the most important thing you taught me was how to be a gentleman.”
Rehle’s son Jordan Higham said many of his mother’s former students felt the same way. “Countless times throughout my life I have had strangers tell me about their experience in the class and how it has helped them in life,” he recalled. “It might have helped them get a job, make a great first impression, impress their future wife or numerous other situations.”
In addition to dance, Rehle was a talented painter whose paintings were displayed in galleries in Jackson, Wyo., Park City, Utah, and throughout Idaho. Jordan said his mother passed along her love of art and dance to him and his six siblings.
“We all have our own personal original art collections in our homes,” he said. “For me it was helping set up for or sitting at art shows with her and delivering paintings to galleries. Growing up attending countless dance recitals, ballets, plays and other performances instilled in us all a love and appreciation for dance. I would say most of us have passed that on to our children as well.”
