The Thoreau Scholarship Committee met this month and awarded the 2019 scholarships. This year is the first year we have expanded the scholarship to more schools and we invited students who are part of the Houston Refugee program to apply. One of the refugee kids was selected!  I thought you would like to see the note I just got from a teacher in the refugee program:

“Thank you from the depths of my heart. We screamed and cried!  This is what I posted that night.

I screamed at the top of my lungs yesterday. Here’s why. I got a text message from one of my former students. It said he had received a text message from a scholarship committee asking him to let them know when he could speak. I ran down the hall to ask a fellow teacher to pray. Right when I was telling her, I got a text from the student that he had WON!!!!! I couldn’t help it, I probably screamed louder than I have ever yelled in my life. (Yes, I completely forgot I was in a classroom with accordion walls.) So many reasons this was incredible. Full ride. First gen. Struggling family and more.

Later that evening when the student called me again, I gave him a “You are going to need to work hard and up your game,” speech. He told me, “Ms., if ever I don’t feel like working hard in college I will remember my mother. She wanted to go to college. She went throughout the neighborhood asking for any kind of work she could find hoping she could pay for it. She didn’t have enough money to pay though, so she went to the college and sat outside the doors just to listen.”

“Did she ever get enough money to ‘go’ to college? “

“No, she just sat outside the doors.”

FULL RIDE …if he keeps his grades up. SOOO SOOO SOOO EXCITED. (Student actually graduated last year and had been working back/ he couldn’t afford to go to college.

I am so grateful and so appreciative of your generosity. Axel will do a great job.  He is a student who had to work and thus could not do the types of things that would have qualified him for other scholarships. Without you, I do not think he would be able to go. Thank you so much for believing in him.  He came up to the school to write the scholarship. For all the years I have known him, he had had a part of him closed off emotionally. The day he opened up about his family he finally cried about it. This scholarship I believe is the beginning of giving him a great hope. Thank you. “

If you would like to be part of the Thoreau Dream Scholarship by donating money towards this worthy cause, we could sure use more funding! Now that the scholarship is a separate 501c3 and no longer run through the church, you can make a tax-deductible  donation to our PayPal account under thoreau.scholarship@gmail.com or you can send a check made out to Thoreau Dream Scholarship, 4002 Alexis Tate Circle, Missouri City, TX.  77459