Thank you for offering to help review this year’s Future of St. John Valley Aspirations Scholarship applications!

Below are the 2026 applications from Madawaska. We will review the Dr. Levesque/Wisdom applications onsite. For Madwaska we have appliocations from 15 3rd graders, 22 4th graders, 19 5th graders, 23 6th graders for a total of 79.

We now need to select recipients. We might award 30 scholarships from the two schools combined, 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 to submit a completely 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, 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. It looks like this includes all 3rd graders this year. 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, or the teacher just didn’t make it happen. 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. Most students and teachers had both recommendations. This takes effort on someone’s part, often the teacher’s. I think students need to learn to follow the directions and do what is asked. It is unlikely they will be able to choose the questions they want to answer on a job application or a college application.

Also 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. There are always a lot of +’s and -’s. 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

MES Grade 3
MES Grade 4
MES Grade 5
MMHS Grade 6

Score sheet
12 Tips