Fairfield Rotary honors high school scholars

Academic scholars include Brando Vaquez Rodriguez, Andrew Hopper, Angel Jennings, Dryanna Hesse, Avery Pennington, Sarahi Velaquez, and Parsina Tiwari, as well as Quinton Jarrett and Daniella Otisi, who were absent at the ceremony.

Tiwari, however, was given the highest honor by the club, named for the late Sterling Uhler. Rotarian Warren Webb described Uhler’s character and mindset through a golf analogy. He said golfers at times can create a divot when putting on the green, and if a golfer makes a divot, “it’s your job to fix that divot so the next golfer who putts has a nice, smooth surface. But the unwritten rule is not only do you fix your divot, but you fix somebody’s else’s. I think that idea was Sterling. He was a wonderful, wonderful person. He was the first person to make everybody feel at home and enjoy a meeting every Friday. That is not an easy thing to do.”

Webb said during Tiwari’s scholarship interview, she “was one of the more impressive meetings I’ve ever witnessed.”

Academically, Tiwari has never had a grade-point average under 4.0 and finished her Fairfield High School career with a 4.2 GPA. She’s been a member of the Fairfield National Honor Society and the Butler Tech National Technical Honor Society, and since her freshman year has completed more than 115 hours of community service through service and leadership clubs.

This does not include her work with Fairfield’s Asian-American Association, Business Professionals of America, Health Care Professionals of America (she wants to go into nursing), and volunteer work with Big Brothers Big Sisters, among others.

“With all of these opportunities in high school, I’ve always been driven to try new things, which has brought me to where I am today,” she said in her application for the Rotary Scholarship. “I learned how to discover things that interest me, helped me make friends, and step beyond my comfort zone.

The Rotary Club also honored newly minted Fairfield High School graduate Donna Julian-Mendoza with an art scholarship, and Creekside Middle School seventh-grade math teacher Faith Koehne was named the Fairfield Rotary Club’s Educator of the Year.