Amaya Brown wants to pursue crime scene investigating when she graduates high school. De’Neshia Jones has wanted to go to college since the fifth grade and wants to become a pediatrician. Aisley Scarboro also wants to become a pediatrician — and move to Paris.
    On Thursday, these students and two other high achieving seventh-graders’ dreams for higher education were made possible by Gov. Nathan Deal’s REACH Georgia Scholarship.
    The REACH Scholars were: Brown from Langston Chapel Middle School, Jones from Southeast Bulloch Middle School, Amonica Kirkland from Portal Middle High School, Kailana Low from Langston Chapel Middle School, and Scarboro from Portal Middle High.
    Kirkland is known by her teachers and her classmates as a natural born leader who wants to study business. Low wants to study teaching in college and expresses a desire to help people. These high-achieving students were ecstatic to have the resources to succeed in their goals.
    “The program is meant is to make education available and accessible for every student who wants it,” said Brian Moore, the program associate for REACH, which stands for Realizing Educational Achievement Can Happen.
      At the ceremony,  the REACH Scholars were awarded a $10,000 scholarship that they will receive upon their graduation from high school. If they choose to go to one of the 60 colleges REACH is partnered with, the amount of their scholarship can double or even triple. For example, if the Bulloch County REACH Scholars attend Georgia Southern University, East Georgia State College or Ogeechee Technical College, they will each receive $20,000.
     “It prepares our future workforce, increases high school graduation rate and also increases access to higher education,” Moore said. 
    REACH considers these students to be hardworking leaders. The REACH Scholars have high goals and, with the scholarship, the resources to achieve them. “Being selected as a REACH Scholar is an honor and is not given, but earned,” Moore said.
     Bulloch County is one of five counties chosen to pilot the program, an honor that makes Superintendent Charles Wilson proud.
     “We change the future one day at a time and one person at a time,” Wilson said in his comments to the new REACH Scholars.
     After the recipients and their parents signed for their scholarship rewards, Moore expressed his enthusiasm for the REACH Scholars and gave them some advice.
     “Don’t always look at failure as such a bad thing and something to avoid, but an opportunity to grow and become better and stronger,” Moore said.