2010 Seneca East Christi Thomas Scholarship Winners

As one of the five members of the Christi Thomas Scholarship selection committee, I can assure you deciding this year's Seneca East Scholarship winner was an absolute killer! There were 17 (seventeen) outstanding applicants. (I've taught them all.) They were all deserving of a $1,000 award, but financially, we could only select one $1,000 winner. Reading, scoring and debating all of the applicants, we selected Courtney as this year's scholarship recipient. I'm sure Christi would be proud.

We wanted to give all of the applicants something; however, that would have added up to about another $2,000 so we just couldn't, but it was heartbreaking not to do so. We decided to award the five highest scoring students with a $100 book scholarship to help with the students' book bills in the fall since that would "only" be an additional $500.

I was in the midst of teaching summer school and Shayla was down with the chicken pox, so Shayne made the scholarship presentation at the high school last week. I've heard he did great making comments about Christi being a little prankster and how that tied in with my computer crash. I'm thankful Shayne went and made the presentation himself, that we were able to award some outstanding students with some money and that Shayla, after having to take seven days off of school due to the chicken pox, will be back tomorrow to end her fifth grade year. The end of fifth grade - wild. Seems like Christi just started, now Shayla will actually end. Odd, it's all so very, very odd.

And after going to the cemetery to "visit" Christi one night last week, I'm going to get that gravestone marker ordered for her soon. Also, when I received the sweetest email this weekend from a mom of one of her classmates who took some of Christi's friends to the cemetery it just made me realize (again) I must get that done - like this week. (Fingers crossed I'll have the guts to really do it! I've decided waiting for that "perfect" picture of her to surface just isn't going to happen.)

Have a wonderful week!