Moose River Future of Maine Aspirations Scholarship Applications

Below are the 2026 Future of Maine Aspirations Scholarship applications from 2026. 42 of them, which is a nice increase from past years. Six 3rd graders, four 4th graders, eight 5th graders, ten 6th graders, and 14 7th graders. We now need to select recipients. We might award 10 - 20 scholarships if we decided that that many were worthy. We care most about effort, so anyone can earn a scholarship who makes the effort.

I encourage you to read the application requirements and the prompts. They are different for each grade. You should also look at the Expectations Checklist and you may want to look at the 12 Tips I gave to them. We define college very broadly, so most any program after high school works for this scholarship. They do need submit a complete application and we do ask them to have their application be error-free. We can be a little flexible on this if you choose. 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th do need to identify a college of interest. Everyone needs to rate their effort in school and on the application, and the teacher needs to do the same.

We do ask for comments from a parent or other adult mentor. This gets complicated. There are some strong applications with no parent/mentor comment. That may be because the student didn’t get the job done, or it may be because the student doesn’t have support at home. It can be hard to remove them from our list of recipients because of unsupportive parents, on the other hand, they did have the option to get some other adult mentor to write something. That could be an adult at school.

IAlso below is a link to a scoresheet you can use if you wish. It is hard to score the first few when you have nothing to compare them to. I suggest you read several before scoring any. Generally, we score them as follows: 1 = Weak and not worthy of a scholarship; 2 = Solid and maybe worthy, but not sure; 3 = Very strong and definitely worthy of a scholarship. Selecting recipients is almost always hard.

This is not a writing contest. This is an opportunity for us to recognize effort and provide encouragement to students who put in the effort and could probably use a little extra encouragement and recognition, or to students who just did a great job.

Let me know if you have any questions. bstuart@mainecollegecircle.org or 207-318-5400. Thanks!

Bob Stuart

Grade 3, 4, and 5 Jackman FOM apps 2026

Grade 6 and 7 Jackman FOM apps 2026

12 Tips

Scoresheet