Save Me a Spot

So I'm sure no one has missed the memo about the give a day get a day promotion from Disney. This year if you give a day of service with a partner charity you can get a free day pass to one of the Disney theme parks. 

I'm in California only about an hour from Disneyland so it was perfect! I looked through many of the possible options. Many of them were full, required a long term commitment (which I can't give because I'm only here for a few months), or required extensive paperwork and application processes.

I finally found the one that was perfect for me. It was a volunteer judge position with the Save Me a Spot in College contest. All I had to do was read a batch of 30 written entries for this contest and submit my top three favorites. Easy enough right?

I found out this morning after I received and read my first batch that it is far from easy. 

My particular batch of essays comes from a group of 8th grade children. A lot of whom are the first generation of their family to be born in this country. Even more of them have parents who did not get to go to college. 

Now the task of picking only three out of 30 children hoping to go to college seems really, really hard. How do you decide which of these deserving and needing children gets an opportunity for a college scholarship? I only get to know about these kids in 400 words or less, and it is both not enough and way too much. Getting a scholarship to college could potentially change the lives of these students. How am I qualified to decide this?

When I know what doors college has opened for me, I certainly cannot take the responsibility of giving a child a chance to go to college lightly. 

Notes: These are paraphrased not direct quotes:

One essay said:

I bet you dreamed of going to college too. Now look at you! You reached your goals and now have the chance to give kids like me the same opportunity.

another said:

I want to prove that poor girls can graduate college just the same as rich girls.

One thing all the essays had in common was their complete faith in their ability to make a difference for good in this world. Almost every essay mentions how if they are able to go to college and make something of themselves they will benefit the entire state and its residents and improve the lives of their parents and their future children.

Nearly every essay also mentioned how their peers deserved to go to college as well. While they were competing for a scholarship, hardly any of the essays focused only on the writer. They used a collective we:

We deserve to go to college.

We can change the world.

We can have a better life with more opportunities than our parents.

My peers and I need your help.

Etc., etc.

But I do have to choose. Why don't we just instate a logistical nightmare known as free college education? Public college? I like that idea!

So the point of this post is I have a lot of thinking and decision making to do.

Oh, and I miss my job at the elementary school too.

And shame on the writers of The Office for the ridiculous Scott's Tots episode.

It wasn't funny.