Facing the future
By Bobbi Mlynar (Contact)
Originally published 08:59 a.m., May 17, 2008
Updated 08:59 a.m., May 17, 2008
When Matthew Pierce thought his back was against the wall, he found a buffer zone made by Emporia High School teachers and counselors.
“The counselors and the teachers have had my back every since I got there,” Matt said. “They’ve been very supportive of my situation ... They’ve helped me to succeed and get me where I need to be going.”
Matt will graduate from EHS on Sunday and already has accepted the Jones Foundation offer of a $1,000 scholarship voucher to attend Emporia State University. He plans to become an athletic trainer.
Matt said that when he came to Emporia after three years at Highland Park High School in Topeka, neither his grades nor his attitude about school were good.
“I probably had a D average,” he said. “I just didn’t like it there. I’d show up at school twice a week.
“I don’t know how I got Ds. I should have gotten all Fs.”
He believes the counselor at Highland Park may have been trying to motivate him when they talked together before he left to come to EHS.
“The counselor there told me I had little chance of graduating high school and I should not be thinking about college,” Matt recalled. “I think he did that on purpose. ... I don’t think he meant that in a completely negative way.”
Matt’s motivation began to climb after the move, and he finishes at EHS with a high-B average, with only a handful of Cs during his two years here.
“So it’s been a big improvement,” Matt said.
His chances to earn a scholarship, however, were not good.
“The thing that’s holding me back is my cumulative grades,” he said. “I went out pretty high” from EHS.
Matt said that he and his brother, who also will graduate Sunday from EHS, both have taken the opportunity offered by the Jones Foundation vouchers.
“It pays toward tuition and book costs,” said Matt, who already has been lining up other forms of financial aid — like loans and grants — to help pay for his higher education.
Matt said that Bobbi Fagg and other employees in the ESU financial aid office offered an abundance of assistance, and the Jones money will make his college costs easier to afford.
The financial aid employees “do that for everybody but that helps me, considering I didn’t have the best grades and stuff,” he said.
“I just want to say one thing on the Jones Foundation. I was the one that was chosen to do this interview, but I want to say that every single senior is thankful to get this money to go to ESU or the technical college.”
As of Thursday afternoon, many seniors from Lyon, Coffey and Osage counties already had let ESU know that they planned to use the Jones vouchers in the fall.
“Right now, we have awarded 150, but we believe that number will increase as we get closer to fall,” said Elaine Henrie, director of financial aid and scholarships and interim registrar at ESU.
The $1,000 Jones vouchers were the result of a decision made by the Jones Foundation board of trustees, which created the program with only one qualifying criteria and one restriction: The high school graduates or GED recipients from the current school year must be from the three-county area and must use the $1,000 one-time scholarship only at ESU or the Flint Hills Technical College.
Senior Sinjin Andrews plans to do the latter.
He has enrolled in the machine tool technology program at FHTC, where he already was taking classes.
His interest in running machine tools and C&C machines, mills and lathes grew after a tour of the class during his junior year; he was fascinated by the computer-run machines and all that could be made by programming the correct codes into them.
“I knew machinsts, and I knew what they did, but I didn’t know that was what I wanted to do until I got a look at it,” Sinjin said.
Because of the cooperation among three major employers of machinists and welders — Kansa, Detroit Diesel and Vektek — he will be trained in ways that will make him a good employee prospect.
“They inform our teacher what they would like him to teach us,” Sinjin said. “It’s kind of a give-take relationship between the companies and our teacher.”
Sinjin said he has heard that a shortage of about 500,000 machinists and welders will occur within the next three to five years, which also improves his own job prospects.
Until then, however, he faced the prospect of tuition and book costs. The Jones voucher has removed some of that worry.
“It’ll help me tremendously,” Sinjin said. “I would have probably had to take out a lot of loans. It’ll help me end up getting to my future a lot faster.”
His work on that will begin in late summer.
He plans to take general-education college courses in the mornings and the machine-tool classes in the afternoon, in order to earn an associate’s degree.
Then, he plans to get a job in Emporia.
“I was born and raised here,” he said, smiling as he explained. “It’s not too bad of a little old town.”
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Posted by Bjnemp (anonymous) on May 17, 2008 at 10:52 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Some youngsters with work ethic, positive attitude, and eye to the future. Good for them. I wish them all the best life has to offer those willing to work and contribute; and it sounds as if they are.
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