Overview provided by Lee Prellwitz, who has given exhaustive time toward assisting and promoting these programs.

STRIVE

Ripon Rotary started the STRIVE program four years ago after Peter Sensenbrenner became aware of the program while doing a make-up at Neenah Rotary. (Another benefit of doing make-ups.) Neenah was very willing to share information about its program, and even sent members down to provide us with information. Ripon Rotarians involved in start-up included Sue Finch Brown, Peter Sensenbrenner, Kathy Schwandt, Jane Schueler, Karen Geisler, Doug Bradley (who ran the program for its first two years), Dan Tjernagel, Nita Krenz and Lee Prellwitz. Steve Hazell, guidance counselor for Ripon High School joined Mr. Tjernagel from RHS in the planning process. Nita Krenz led the fundraising effort the first year, and thanks to generosity of one of our members, the Webster Foundation, the Green Lake Foundation, a District Simplified Grant (DSG), and other generous donations from members and local businesses nearly $12,000 was raised. We are spending (depending on whether we maximize scholarship payouts or not) approximately $4500 per year on the program. We have made no more general fundraising efforts, but with another DSG, this year’s $5000 from the Webster Foundation, and the club treasury paying a portion each year ($1700 last year because of the decline in the Rotary Foundation balance) we are still in a black position, but another fundraising effort will need to be planned in the near future.

The program is designed for RHS juniors and seniors who enter their junior year with a GPA of 2.0 or less. The program is voluntary, with monthly meetings, some held at RHS and some offsite trips. We have had many of our members participate in the programs. During the course of the time they are in the program we lose some students for various reasons, but this past year our retention rate (of those who remained in RHS) was very good.

REACH

In the fall of 2008 we were asked by the Ripon Exploration and Application Charter High (REACH) program if we could include REACH juniors and seniors in the activities, even though they were ineligible (GPAs above 2.0) for the STRIVE program. Clearly stipulating to these students that they would not be eligible for the “scholarship” portion of the STRIVE program, we invited them, again voluntarily, to participate in the activities. We decided this year that we would help the REACH students to the extent of paying (maximum of two per student) their application fee for applying to a two year college or four year university. Five REACH students are eligible for that benefit. In addition, I believe that some REACH members have the opportunity to receive scholarships at the RHS awards program on Wednesday evening thanks to the Golden Rule Credit Union and Rotary member Dan Ige. And Dan asked the STRIVE program for input on some of the candidates.

Scholarships and Recognition

Seven STRIVE seniors --- Mayra Ambrocio, Chris Nighbor, Jacob Salem, Tyler Smith, Stephen Soyk, Eric Walters and Faik (Frankie) Zenku received “scholarships” totaling $2700. In addition, Frankie was given an alarm clock; something about his alarm clock not going off and sleeping through an 11:15 STRIVE meeting. The total of “scholarships” awarded over the four years of the program is $10,150 for 29 STRIVE students.

Individual amounts were determined by looking at GPA (from the end of the sophomore year going forward), STRIVE attendance (although if students asked out to go to their regular class they were excused), and overall school attendance, which was weighted the heaviest since all GPAs had increased slightly. In addition we looked at the category I call “getting it.” We solicited input from Mr. T., Steve Hazell, and Christine Skoog, who also talked with the teachers in the REACH program who have a great number of the STRIVE students in their classes,