Henrico's Top Teachers – Keylon Mayo, Highland Springs High School, business and marketing

First impressions matter. As a high school teacher and football coach, Keylon Mayo knows this well.

Every time Mayo passes a student in the hallway, whether he knows them or not, he always says hello and sometimes offers up a fist bump.

Mayo is also well known in Highland Springs High School for a running joke he has with the students. When Mayo walks past a student, he’ll say, “Excuse me, you dropped something on the ground,” and while they’re frantically looking around to see what they dropped, he’ll go, “Psych!”

“I’ve pretty much gotten every single student in the building. I’ll even yell it over the balcony when they’re walking,” Mayo said. “So everyone knows to be on alert when I’m walking by.”

It’s a funny way to break the ice, but it’s also a way for Mayo to show students that he is more than just a teacher who works in their same building – he is a coach and a mentor, someone who cares about them past just their grades and test scores, and a friendly face when someone is struggling or having a bad day.

High-schoolers will only truly listen to those who have gained their full trust and respect. The same is true for people in the real world. As a business teacher, Mayo encourages his students to “dress to impress” and always present their best selves. And as a businessman outside of school, he helps his clients do just that with his own men’s apparel business, “Mr. Klean Kut.”

But Mayo is aware that some students at Highland Springs High lack the means to dress well for every occasion. So during the past few years, Mayo has built a “Gentlemen’s Closet” at the school, stocked with several hundred suits, dress shirts, shoes, and more, for male students to borrow at no cost, whether they need clothes for a job interview, a class presentation, or even prom.

“I always explain to my students that first impression is everything. I want to make sure that they’re as clean as possible and as neat as possible, and it also makes them feel better when they know they’re presenting themselves in the best way,” Mayo said.

Mayo sees his high school business class as almost an “Adult 101 class,” working with his students on life skills such as public speaking, money management, networking, and presenting themselves confidently. He often shares about his own business and tries to be transparent with his students and engage them in real “adult conversations.”

He also connects his students to real-life people in the industry, bringing in judges, tattoo artists, professional athletes, clothing designers, and bakers to speak with his class through his “If You Only Knew” project.

“My main thing is definitely exposure,” Mayo said. “So if a student says, ‘Hey, I want to be a chef,’ then I connect them with a chef. If they want to be a music producer, I introduce them to a music producer.”

Mayo does the same for the players on Highland Springs’ football team, which he helps coach. Since he joined in 2016, Mayo has helped place 140 students onto college football teams, allowing many to go to college for either very little or for free.

On top of all that, Mayo also started a new tradition at Highland Springs High called the “100 Men Challenge,” an annual event when 100 men from the community come to the school to help welcome students in the morning and then host an assembly for all of the school’s male students. From just that day, many young men have been able to find male mentors or even job opportunities.

But more than just networking, the 100 Men Challenge shows young male students that there are men in their neighborhoods that care about them and want to support them, Mayo said.

In 2015, the Highland Springs area was reported to have the third-highest proportion of “missing” Black men in the nation – men who were absent from their communities and families due to incarceration, early death, or other reasons – making the presence of male mentors much more important, Mayo said.

“A lot of our students are raised by a mom or a grandma. And while we’ve got a lot of fathers that are present, there’s a big population of fathers that are not,” Mayo said. “So just being positive males, just welcoming them in, just makes the student feel wanted, have a purpose.”

For Mayo, the hardest part of teaching is a pain that will never get easier – losing a student. During the past 17 years Mayo has spent teaching, including seven at Highland Springs High, he has lost several students, and every time he asks himself, “was there more I could have done?”

But, for his students, there is nothing that Mayo wouldn’t do, even if it means spending his own money and taking time out of his personal life to support them.

“There’s times where a student is homeless, a student needs clothes for prom, or a student needs food, and I’m taking money out of my own pocket and just trying to make sure my students have got exactly what they need,” he said. “They know I’d give them the shirt off my back, the shoes off my feet, if they truly needed it.”

Mayo’s devotion to his students goes far beyond the typical expectations of a high school teacher, according to other staff at Highland Springs; every single day, Mayo is the teacher in the building who is “making a positive impact and hustling for people.”

“This guy lives and breathes for his family first, and the kids at HSHS a close second,” said one of Mayo’s co-workers. “I could not begin to accurately estimate the amount of scholarship money he has secured students each and every year from the classroom and the football program. . . He is an inspiring co-worker, and I am honored to call him a friend.”