2011 Scholarship Recipient
Kayla Pochop
Nominated by Darlene Neiles
I am honored to have been asked by Kayla Pochop to provide an applicant appraisal for your scholarship. I have known Kayla for four years through my advising role of our school’s Student Senate. She has been a member of our Student Sensate all four years of her high school career. Currently she holds the position of Student Body President and Senior class Vice-President.
There are many good example Kayla’s kindness and good citizenship but the one I will remember most is her organization and planning of our “Christmas Wishes” project for Student Senate. For this project, Kayla contacted a variety of organizations in our community around Christmas time to ask what their needs would be. Using these lists, Kayla organized a competition amongst our English classes to collect clothes, food, toiletries, and blankets to name just a few items. The project took hours and hours of planning, organizing, and packing of these items as well as keeping a running tally for the English classes to keep the excitement going for the students. In the end, this project collected hundreds of items which were distributed and there were even left over items to give to needy families through the elementary schools. I cannot remember a more memorable community project our Student Senate has undertaken.
Kayla’s challenges were organizing fellow Student Senate members to help with the English classes. She learned that kids do not always follow through with that they say they will do. She had to constantly follow-up to see that the class items were tallied and picked up every day. Another challenge was distributing the hundreds of items. I do not think she had any idea of how many items were going to be collected. She and her fellow students Senate members spent hours organizing the hundreds of items, packing them up and getting them to the organizations.
Kayla took on the role of leader for this project, ambassador to our school, mediator amongst her peers and ultimately Santa Claus.
This project had never been done before. Kayla and her fellow Student Senate members came up with this idea because of their kind hearts and took the initiative to undertake a project of this size. Even when the project blew out of proportion, in a good way, Kayla stuck with it giving it hours and hours of her time. She never had to be reminded of her duties.
This project is just one example of Kayla’s contribution to our school and community. She is also thinking of what she can do to make things better for her fellow peers and works hard to make things happen. She does this while being careful to not be domineering to demeaning of others. She has many friends and everyone cares for her as is evident by the fact that she was voted in as the homecoming queen by the entire school.