Six Jonesville High School students received awards last month for their academic success.

The College Board’s National Recognition Program awarded these students the National Rural and Small Town Award, according to a Jonesville High School Facebook post. This award is open to students who achieve a GPA of 3.5 or higher before they graduate.

Winners included seniors Brady Wright, Damion Scharer, Holland Thompson, and Tiana Palmer, and students Hannah Spencer and Sierra Winter.

Scharer has a current GPA of 4.075 and received both the National Rural and Small Town Award and the National Merit Scholarship. 

According to a September Facebook post from Jonesville High School, this made him “one of 16,000 high school seniors nationwide, one of 465 Michigan seniors, and the first semifinalist Jonesville High School has had in over two decades.”

Thompson has received various awards for music and sports, and has been on Jonesville’s High School’s Honor Roll for the past two years with a GPA of 3.956, she said.

Thompson said she hopes to study at the University of Pennsylvania or the University of California, Berkeley, as a band and drama director or a history and English teacher. 

“I love music and theater,” Thompson said. “They’re some of the only things that bring me true joy, and I can’t imagine how dull life would be without them.” 

A love of music and theater also runs in her family, she said. 

“My siblings and I have all been taught to sing since before we could talk, and every single one of us was in our high school band,” Thompson said.

 Thompson plays guitar and trumpet, and she said one of her most important performances in theater was “Peter Pan” in second grade.

“My parents have taken us to see a multitude of plays each year, so I’ve grown up watching professionals as well as my siblings perform,” Thompson said. “I guess that’s one of the reasons I love it so much, because it helps me stay close to my family.” 

Palmer also received the award, and said her hard work was worth it.

“I just did my best and that hard work paid off. As I got older, I realized that continuing to work hard would get me wherever I wanted to go,” Palmer said.

Winter, who plans to graduate high school in 2024, achieved a 4.0 GPA. She said she had been interested in learning new languages for a long time.

“Teaching English abroad just felt right to me, and the more I researched, the more I felt like it was the career for me,” she said. 

Winter also advised other students not to be too critical of themselves or expect high grades all the time. She said it takes hard work to be the best you can be, but the best is not perfection.

Palmer gave similar advice to her fellow students.

“There is no secret to success – all it takes is hard work and dedication,” she said. “I’ve had to work hard to make it to the top of my class: I am not as naturally gifted as some of my peers. Hard work is what matters.”