The Etowah County Republican Party (ECRP) Executive Committee recently awarded a $1,500 scholarship to four local students.
The 2023 Etowah County Republican Party Scholarship recipients were Katie Giles, Glencoe High School; Caleb Smith, Parker Gross and Emily Davenport, all from Southside High School.
The organization intended to award only three scholarships, but due to missing out on being chosen for one of the three scholarships by less than one percent, the ECRP membership voted to award a fourth scholarship to Davenport. Smith is already en-rolled in classes at Troy State.
“The giving of the scholarships is just one of the ways we are giving back to the community,” ECRP chair Tammy Driskill said. “Investing in our young people is always a good investment.”
The scholarships were made available to Etowah County students either in high school or college.
Scholarship applications were sent to each of the Etowah County schools and students were asked to include work history, current transcript, any volunteer work for Republican candidates, extracurricular activities, community service time and two letters of recommendation.
ECRP secretary Amy Minton said that the students were also asked to submit an essay to describe how they met the criteria for the scholarship. She also said that all of the scholarship applications received were “excellent and provided great hope in our future leadership.”
Dr. Lana Bellew, chairperson of the scholarship committee said that the scholarship sub-committee had a scoring rubric to use when evaluating applications.
“Each sub-committee member received a copy of the student’s essays that were numbered rather than containing their names,” Bellew said. “We wanted to be non-biased in our scoring… Once committee members scored and turned in their forms, the forms were compiled for a total. The scores were placed on a sheet that contained the names of the applicant. Therefore, we found out the names as we were assigning scores.”
The ECRP scholarship committee is composed of Dr. Lana Bellew, chair; Jay Freeman, Cassandra “Sam” Johnson, Carson Butler and Amy Minton.
