How does helping others get you $25,000 in scholarships, school recognition, letters of recommendation for colleges and more? Juniors Erika Nettles, Morgan Simmons and Candice Overcash have the answer.
The three juniors have been nominated to compete for the title of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Students of the Year. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is the largest voluntary health agency dedicated to blood cancers around the world, and according to Nettles, aims to “promote awareness for leukemia and lymphoma and cancers that local teens our age have been diagnosed with and have recovered from.”
The team is against other students in the Triangle over the course of seven weeks, and if they collect the most donations in the area, they will move on to state and national level competitions.
“It originally started with women and men of the year, and now they trickled it down to student of the year,” Relay for Life advisor Jackie Sculli said. “This is the first year it’s been in North Carolina for Students of the Year, so Northwood was selected over a hundred or so schools to be a part of this fundraising campaign, so that’s what we’re doing.”
The team was chosen by fellow students who recognized the girls’ work ethic.
“I am the advisor for Relay For Life so I pitched it to my Relay For Life club, and I chose three seniors,” Sculli said. “They decided that they wanted juniors to do it because they were so busy with college applications at the time. So they brought it down to juniors, and Erika, Candice and Morgan were chosen through my senior Relay for Life group because they showed leadership, they were mature and they just thought that they would do a really great job. And they’re great girls.”
Overcash chose to take the opportunity due to the presence of cancer in her own family.
“My family has been involved with leukemia specifically and a lot of cancers,” Overcash said. “My sister personally had cancer when she was really young and my grandma just passed with cancer last summer, so I felt that it was something that I had a calling for. I felt like it was something that I needed to do for my family.”
If the group wins, Northwood will also benefit by gaining recognition, and according to Sculli, will “get represented very well in a nice light.”
Simmons agrees.
“For our school, it would be so great because we’re kind of out of the Triangle area and they made an exception for us to compete in this,” Simmons said. “I think it would be really nice for Northwood and it would just bring so much recognition to our school, because they’re such a large corporation, and they do so much, so it would do so much for us. That would be awesome.”
Nettles believes that the contest is about much more than the money.
“It would mean a lot [to win] because I feel like we put in a lot of work, and we are going to continue to put in a lot of work to raise money and to raise awareness,” Nettles said. “It’s not just about raising money; it’s letting [people] know that this is what’s happening to kids your age. This is what’s happening and everybody has been affected by cancer…. What you could do, giving a dollar, could save a life.”
– By Sara Heilman
