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Category: Community News Community News
Published: 16 May 2022 16 May 2022

Silver City, NM: Sylvia Rain Myers been named by the New Mexico Foundation as the 2022 recipient of the Aldo Leopold Charter School’s Ella, Michael and Ella Memorial Scholarship. She has been awarded $2,000.

The Ella, Michael, Ella Memorial Scholarship was established in 2015 in loving honor and memory of the Aldo Leopold Charter School students Ella Kirk, Michael Mahl and Ella Myers who lost their lives in an airplane accident in May of 2014. Their dedication to environmental studies, music and the arts, and their level of community involvement and civic engagement, serves as an inspiration to all.

Sylvia was born in the village of Pinos Altos, and has loved the forest ever since. Growing up in and around Silver City, she learned to love the rivers, creeks, and wild spaces of southwest New Mexico, while also gaining a love of travel and adventure as she road tripped with her family across the country, visiting friends and family in Colorado, California, and New England. As a student at Aldo Leopold Charter School, Sylvia found a strong community of friends and kindred spirits who shared her love of adventure and the outdoors. In her time at Aldo, she strove for academic excellence, participated in the Ecomonitoring YCC crew, Envirothon, and took a variety of classes under the dual enrollment program at WNMU. After COVID hit during her sophmore year and everything went online, Sylvia was able to attend the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington, DC for the spring semester of her junior year. This fall, Sylvia will be attending Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA where she hopes to double major in Peace and Conflict Studies and Environmental Science.

She’s also excited about Swarthmore’s Ultimate Frisbee team and their birding club. The Ella, Michael, Ella Scholarship will help cover her tuition expenses at this incredible institution. At this time, Sylvia envisions pursuing opportunities to engage in service learning or volunteer work abroad after she completes her educational career.

This Memorial Scholarship Fund helps to continue to keep Ella, Michael and Ella in all our hearts and minds by providing other Aldo Leopold Charter School students the opportunity to reach their own potential in the manner we so admired in each of these three students.

The mission of the Ella, Michael, Ella Memorial Scholarship is to inspire young people to follow their passion for the environment, the arts, music, and community involvement and to support them as they begin their post-secondary studies. Since 2015 the Scholarship fund has awarded $15,500 to twelve recipients.

The New Mexico Foundation is the entity that manages the Scholarship Fund and the selection process. Awards are made each year. To be eligible for the scholarship, students must have a 3.0-grade average or higher, be a graduating senior from Aldo Leopold High School the year that the scholarship is gifted, and have plans to enroll in a full time accredited program. To help support this scholarship, donations can be made to the fund directly to the New Mexico Community Foundation or to Aldo Leopold Charter School Foundation at PO Box 183 Silver City, NM 88062

Aldo Leopold Charter School is a tuition-free public charter school that provides an engaging and challenging educational program for grades 6 through 12 emphasizing direct experience, inquiry learning, stimulation of the creative process, and stewardship of our community and natural environment.