Recognizing the area's brightest students
My newspaper column
Emily Tennant lives on a small cattle farm where she helps feed, vaccinate and calve the livestock. She's also No. 1 in her senior class at Northwest High School.
During an internship last summer, Carlie Blake noticed some oncology patients struggled getting the necessary paperwork for insurance. As a result, she co-founded MedAssist to help patients handle the paperwork requirements. In the meantime, she's No. 3 in her class at High Point Central.
Brian Lester builds robots. That is, he builds them when he's not attending the Early College at Guilford, an innovative program that mixes high school students in the college environment.
I talked with these students last month -- their class ranks may have changed since then -- and continue to be inspired by their accomplishments. They were among 10 finalists in the News & Record Scholastic Achievement Program, which the paper started in 1990 to recognize the hard work -- the inspired work -- of teenagers in our area. This year, we granted $14,000 in scholarships.
Next Sunday, we will publish a scholastic achievement section that announces the winners of the scholarships and honors each of the 333 students in the program.
Three judges -- Dr. Sue Polinsky, Joyce Gorham-Worsley and Michael Dougherty -- had the difficult task of selecting the winners. I don't know how they did it. I had a hard enough time just deciding which students I would begin this column with.
If all you know about teenagers is what you see on television, you're missing out. Each of the 10 finalists was on time for their interviews. The boys wore ties; the girls were dressed appropriately. No one chewed gum. No one slouched. Everyone said yes sir and no ma'am.
Among the group are several Eagle Scouts. They are members of the lacrosse, soccer, swim, cross-country, tennis and track teams. Not enough? They are volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, Urban Ministry, the Appalachian Service Project and several church mission trips.
Then there is the school work. A simple quote from one the judges to a student sums it up neatly: "Looking at your transcript, it looks like a practice exercise for the letter A."
But here's the thing. It's not necessarily that they were blessed with more gray matter than the rest of us, although I'm pretty certain they have more than I. It's that somewhere along the line, whether they are aware of it or not, they decided not to settle for "good enough."
"You've been faced with a lot of choices in your life," Dougherty said to one candidate, “and at every fork in the road you chose the more challenging course."
Ryan Craver of Western Guilford said, "If your mentality is that I've always got to do my best, I do my best."
Here's how we select the students: We ask guidance counselors at each public school in our circulation area to select teams of outstanding scholars from the 10th, 11th and 12th grades. Those students make up their school's academic team. One senior is chosen as the school's nominee. Each nominee submits dossiers with his or her high school transcript, a summary of extra curricular and community activities and a report on financial need. A team of independent judges then selects the winners. This year, 31 schools participated.
"I think about this money as an investment in a human being," Dougherty, CEO of Kindermusik, said at one point.
Precisely.
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