Empowering Education ~ Voice Of The Township
It’s back-to-school season, and the Wayne Township Trustee Office has been hard at work giving students what they need to succeed in their educational careers.
On July 29th we held our Family Fun Day at the township office where we awarded eleven Academic Encouragement Awards to selected students from Kindergarten to 11th grade. Based on applications written by the students themselves and backed up with recommendations from their teachers or counselors, the winners received a certificate, an internet-ready Amazon Fire and recognition of their achievement by Trustee Austin Knox and the township board.
At the same ceremony three Wayne Township high school graduates were each awarded a $500 Richard A. Stevenson, Sr. Scholarships to help launch their higher education careers this fall.
The following are their stories:
Mary Logan was born in Georgia, and she spent the first years of her life there in foster care. At three-years-old she came to Fort Wayne to live with her grandmother. Despite growing up with many family and physical challenges, Mary kept her shoulder to the wheel and completed her schooling. Her best classwork was in Business Management and Quantitative Reasoning, and she graduated this year from Northside High School. Her guidance counselor at school was particularly impressed by Mary because, despite having endured many traumatic experiences, she never shut down but continued to persevere in her work, and she never shied away from asking for help when she needed it. Mary has been accepted at Purdue Fort Wayne where she will start in August.
Aniya Steel graduated from Wayne High School this year where she was in the inaugural cohort of the Amp Lab at Electric Works, one of the mixed-use redevelopment projects at the General Electric campus in downtown Fort Wayne. The Amp Lab program develops innovation and entrepreneurship in high school juniors and seniors, an experience that inspired Aniya to dream of having her own Interior Design business one day. She has been accepted at Indiana State University where this fall she will be taking classes in drafting, architectural design and communications. She wants to focus on building a business that not only designs first-rate interiors but also builds great customer relations.
Tyleah Nelson’s biology teacher at Wayne High School singles Tyleah out for her kindness, work ethic, and inquisitive nature, and she points out that she maintained those qualities even through all the ZOOM classes and remote learning that everyone experienced during the COVID epidemic. This was a glowing letter of recommendation, but what most impressed us was Tyleah’s grades. During all four years of high school she received only a handful of B’s with all the rest A’s and A+’s. She graduated with a 4.24 GPA and an Academic Honor diploma. She was inducted into the National Honors Society in her junior year and was given the highest academic achievement award for all four years of her high school career. Tyleah has been accepted into the Nursing Program at Ball State University, and from there she wants to become a Family Nurse Practitioner.
This marked the tenth year that the Wayne Township Trustee Office awarded the high school graduate scholarship and the seventh year for the Academic Encouragement Award. Both of these awards are funded not with taxpayer dollars but by individual donations collected in conjunction with our other annual events such as the Family Fun Day. Funds for the college scholarship were also collected from memorial donations made by friends and family of the late Wayne Township Trustee Rick Stevenson.
Trustee Stevenson was such a strong believer in the power of education that it was natural to rename this scholarship the Richard A. Stevenson Sr. Scholarship in 2021, and Trustee Knox is equally committed to helping students succeed. We wish all our students the best as they continue their learning careers.
Happy Back to School!
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