Northern Kentucky student and Newport resident Kirstin Spellman is heading to the Miss Kentucky USA Pageant this Friday and Saturday for her first pageant competition ever.
Spellman said she signed up for the pageant on a whim.
“I was like, ‘there’s no way I’ll get selected; it’s fine.’ I saw it on Facebook, they were publicizing it, and I was like ‘ok’ I signed up for it, and I got an acceptance email, and I was like ‘hold on, is this real?'”
Spellman said she thought it was a scam at first. She reached out to one of her sorority sisters who has competed in pageants in the past, and she confirmed it was real and began helping Spellman prepare for the competition.
The first thing she said she had to decide was what platform she wanted to represent.
“I was in foster care, and it wasn’t very long; it was for about two years,” Spellman said. “And ever since then, I’ve been very, very vocal about things that need to change and about educating people about child abuse. And so that was the first initial step, and so I decided my platform would be Grow with the Children, which was a banquet I had done my freshman year that raised money for like PCAA (prevent child abuse of America) and the family nurturing center.”
Spellman’s time spent in foster care and what she went through in her childhood has prompted her to advocate for the cause, even leading her to go to law school to do juvenile defense.
Before she got placed into foster care, Spellman said she had charges against her by her parents. She worked with her caseworker, and she told her she needed to attend family therapy; however, her mom would not participate, and they ended up going to court.
“My mom and my dad were kind of like ‘oh, we don’t want to deal with her, we don’t want to take care of her,'” Spellman said. “I had an attorney, and she was like ‘no, that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to get the charges dismissed. We’re here to move on from that.’ So, I would meet with this attorney by myself one on one, and she was like, ‘what can we do here? What are your parents doing?’ There was a lot of emotional abuse, I would say at home, and my mom was an addict, my dads an addict. That attorney was like, ‘remember, you’re a bad bitch, you got this.’ Very encouraging, very uplifting was totally on my side. I had never felt like I had someone in my corner defending me through and through. And so, for me, the realization like ‘oh my gosh, I want to do something like that.’ I want to help kids. I want to do something for them. And I think it wasn’t until I got into foster care and became educated with that.”
After recognizing what platform she would run on, Spellman then began meeting with different leaders around Newport about things that have been going on in the city recently and what needed to change with things like homelessness and education. Spellman then created a GoFundMe to spread her platform to the people of Newport.
Spellman is the first person to ever represent the city of Newport for the Miss Kentucky title. As far as representing the city, she said it was a no-brainer.
“I’ve moved so many times in my life,” Spellman said. “Me and my brother sat down and counted, and we’ve lived in 23 different houses. We’ve moved so much. I lived in Indiana. I lived in Cincinnati; I’ve lived in like four different places in Newport alone. I’ve lived in Fort Thomas, all these different places, but Newport was always that one consistent thing.”
Spellman has had to think of how she wants to represent herself by preparing for the pageant. One thing she found vital to her was how she would wear her hair as a biracial woman.
“Another important part was how am I going to style my hair because I’m biracial. So, I have really curly hair,” Spellman said. “And it was like, do I want to send the message to little girls like ‘Oh, it’s ok, it’s professional and beautiful wear your curls.’ But the hard part was I feel a little bit more confident or sexy when I have my straight hair. So, it’s like, do I tell that message, or do I do what makes me feel better? I decided, ok, I’m going to do my curls. Through this process, if anything, I became more confident. Me just being natural, being myself. It’s crazy because you wouldn’t think you would learn something that going through this.”
If you want to help, Spellman get further in the competition, you can vote for her for fan favorite and people’s choice here.
If Spellman is crowned with the title Miss Kentucky, she will then move on to compete for Miss USA. Though winning the crown would not be the end all be all for her. She looks forward to being able to shed light on her reason for competing.
“If you win the pageant, you get a chance to travel, and you get to really support your platform, Spellman said. “You really get to support your cause.”
