The School District of Lee County class of 2018 is seeing green.
The graduating class received over $54 million in scholarships to offset the cost of attending colleges, universities and technical schools across the country.
In a time where students can expect to pay $32,410 in tuition per year for a private education and $9,410 in tuition for an in-state public school, scholarships are more important than ever.
Christina Presmy, an Island Coast High School graduate, will head to Florida A&M in Tallahassee in the fall to study social work. The 18-year-old hopes to become a lawyer and decided accruing debt in undergrad wouldn’t be an option for her.
“I definitely don’t think I would be going off to Tallahassee if I didn’t have these scholarships,” she said. “I mean my home is a one-parent working kind of home, I don’t see how I would pay for tuition. I’ve always wanted to go away; (The scholarships) definitely made it possible for me to go.”
Presmy estimated she applied for 50 scholarships — so many that she had to use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of them all — and now she has the cost of tuition, room and board covered.
During her freshman year of high school Presmy received a Take Stock in Children scholarship, which covers the full cost of tuition for any college in Florida. Then as a senior she received multiple scholarships — The Jane Berktold Scholarship for $5,000, The Cape Coral Mayor's Scholarship for $1,500, The Haitian American Democratic Scholarship for $1,000, a Ronald McDonald House of Charities Scholarship for $1,000, a Kappa Alpha Psi scholarship for $1,000 and a two-year housing stipend from Take Stock in Children.
“I just advise people local is the way to go,” she said of choosing scholarships to apply for. She added that though many students use websites like fastweb.com to find scholarships, she didn't, because she felt she had a greater chance to win local and state scholarships than national ones.
Presmy found many of the scholarships she applied for on her own through search engines and through a mentor, but each Lee County school has a Google classroom database that students and parents can use to find scholarships, Melissa Mickey, a spokeswoman for the district, said.
Students either access the applications, which are offered on a rolling basis from October to May, on their own or with the help of a counselor.
Riverdale High School graduate Antaeveon Payne applied for a number of scholarships, but he found the scholarship he won, The James F. Chelius, Jr., Esq. Scholarship Fund, through a friend.
“I didn’t know about that one, my friend brought it to my attention the day before the deadline and I had to hurry up and fill out the information,” he said. “My friend said ‘you didn’t see the athletic one?’ and that’s the one I actually got.”
Payne will attend Indiana Institute of Technology where he will run on the track team and study recreational therapy debt-free thanks to the Chelius scholarship and a $12,000 academic scholarship he received from the school.
Payne and Presmy are two of 2,019 Lee County 2018 graduates who will attend a four-year college or university. Another 1,650 will attend a two-year community or state college, 502 will attend a technical college or school, 254 will enter the workforce directly and 201 will enter the armed forces.
Presmy, who graduated with a weighted 5.0 GPA and 34 college credits, has advice for the incoming class of seniors: Do everything in moderation, as not to get overwhelmed, keep a spreadsheet of applications, save application essays to be tweaked and reused, and finally: Invest in stamps and envelopes — for mailing applications — you’ll need them.