Roswell Area High School Students Win Scholarships

Centennial High School senior, Dacia Green, is headed to college with a bit more cash and a lot of prestige. Green is one of four Roswell area Black American students to have received the Achievement Scholarship awards through the National Achievement Scholarship Program—a privately financed academic competition established in 1964 specifically to honor scholastically talented Black American youth.

Out of 160,000 who asked for scholarship consideration when taking the 2009 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test as high school juniors, 1,600 made it to the semifinalist level. To advance from there, students were required to write an essay, have a high academic performance record, earn good SAT scores and receive recommendation from a high school official. Only 800 students were selected to receive scholarship funding from the 1,300 finalists.

The awards distributed to these students totaled over $2 million during this 47th annual competition.

In Roswell, Green, Elliott Outland, Zachary Turner and Ana Smith each received $2,500 in scholarship money.

"I feel incredibly blessed and lucky to have won," said Green, who plans to attend Vanderbilt University in the fall. "This has definitely made college more affordable and given me more credibility as a qualified applicant to the schools I applied to. It's also a relief to know that my hard work has paid off, not only by my acceptances, but also with the financial support [and] National Merit offers."

Green plans to major in either economics, history or psychology. She will follow a pre-law track and hopefully attend law school following graduation from college.