Six students at the Pine Ridge Reservation’s Red Cloud High School have been awarded the prestigious Horatio Alger Scholarship.
That’s twice the number of students of any school in South Dakota to receive the scholarship and the most that Red Cloud has received in a single year.
The Horatio Alger competitive scholarship supports deserving young people who have overcome challenges in their lives in order to pursue higher education.
Robin Johnson is principal of Red Cloud High School. She says the reservation doesn’t necessarily lend to a positive learning environment for students.
“It’s hard to drive through parts of the reservation,” Johnson comments. “But when you come to Red Cloud…you pull into the parking lot. You walk into the school…It’s clean, it’s safe and students are in the classrooms getting an education.”
Johnson notes that attention to education is the focus at Red Cloud.
“I’m sure the other schools do that as well,” Johnson observes. “But here at Red Cloud one of our top priorities is to maintain that high level of academics and to provide every opportunity possible to prepare them for college.”
After screaming out loud when she heard the good news, Shawnta Jones went out to dinner with her mother to celebrate her future at Arizona State University studying forensics. Shawnta says her inspiration is her family and her culture
“And I actually want to come back to Pine Ridge after I finish to give back to my community,” explains Shawnta.
The University of Connecticut and a nursing degree is where Caine Ghost Bear plans to use his $6000 scholarship. Caine says his great-grandmother taught him the importance of education.
“She told me to no matter what keep working hard in school,” Caine recalls. “Because without it…then…you’d be working extremely hard later in life.”
And since Carrie Beard’s mother wanted a better life for her daughter than she had herself, Carrie is using her Horatio Alger Scholarship to pursue a chemical engineering degree at Creighton University.
The Horatio Alger Association has awarded $100 million in scholarships to 20,000 students across the country since 1984. Students earn the scholarship by writing personal essays on overcoming adversity in their lives, those who inspired them, and their plans for confronting future challenges that may interfere with their life’s dreams.
***Other Horatio Alger Scholarship recipients include Jennifer Brave Heart, Genrial Ribitsch and Gabriella Rodriguez.
https://www.redcloudschool.org/
http://www.redcloudschool.org/page.aspx?pid=397
https://www.horatioalger.org/scholarships/index.cfm