Mountain America Branch Awards 3 Rural Arizona and Utah Students With Academic Scholarships
Coconino and Kane County youth awarded $1,500 in credit union scholarships; school counselors emphasize increased need due to 'soaring cost of tuition’
As graduation ceremonies unfolded for spring high school graduates, three students from Coconino and Kane County received $1,500 in scholarships from Mountain America Credit Union branch in Kanab to support their financial and academic dreams.
“I applied for five different scholarships because I just needed help with money for college,” said 17-year-old Fredonia High School senior Oscar Button, who received a $500 scholarship from Mountain America’s Kanab team. “Receiving this means a lot to me because that's just one step in helping me get there.”
Button, one of three high school students who received a $500 scholarship from the not-for-profit financial institution’s branch, shared that he is the first from his family to pursue post-secondary academic goals. “Out of five siblings, none of us attended college and my parents never attended college.”
Similar to other high school seniors who received scholarships in rural Utah and Arizona, in the fall, Button plans to begin his first college semester at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Other scholarship recipients include a student from Kanab, Utah, and Layton Kyle Spencer from Valley High School in Orderville, Utah.
Button, a Fredonia native, explained that news of the awarded financial aid from his local Mountain America Credit Union branch in Kanab is timely.
“It is stressful to think about how much money I have to pay for college. I feel a little relief,” said the soon-to-be university student. "I really want to go to college to go into business, graduate and get a good job,” he said.
In a letter, Kanab High School counselor Chad Castagno invited community entities like Mountain America, “... to donate scholarship money to help defray the soaring cost of college tuition, fees and other expenses.”
Understanding the need, Ciera Strong, branch manager at Mountain America’s Kanab branch, reached out to the school’s counselors to inform them of her team’s desire to provide the scholarships.
“My biggest goal coming into this community was to really get to know the schools and work with them,” said Strong. “I talked with my team, and we all decided we wanted to offer scholarships.”
After organizing the scholarship opportunities for high school seniors, Strong and her team reviewed dozens of applications, selected two of three preferred candidates and then awarded the students with giant checks as part of their graduation ceremonies. The third scholarship recipient, a Kanab High School student, was selected by the school’s administration. Beyond a criterion of academic transcripts and summaries of their contributions to their communities, branch team members also evaluated students’ ability to put together a budget proposal for how they planned on financing their educational goals in college.
“That provided some concrete applications of what students are learning in their financial literacy course required for graduation,” said Ashley Chamberlain, a school counselor at Valley High School. “I really liked that piece of the application because it required a little more than just filling out your name and where you want to go to college.”
“For some of these kids it is the only way they can disrupt the trajectory of their lives of really difficult circumstances. It is education that pulls them out of that and then disrupts that pattern,” she said.
With just 150 students in her school’s student body, Chamberlain shared that most youth there come from lower middle-class families.
“Over the years, a lot of our students have been first-generation college students and being in a rural community, they know they do not know about financial aid options,” she said. “So, any little bit really helps these kids especially where a lot of them qualify for free and reduced lunch.”
“After talking with the recipients, it was an incredible experience to see how appreciative they were for the scholarship money and see how much it would help them in their future,” said Strong.
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