Standing on the Stage at Wheat Ridge HS

—Nathan Reich, 2018 Scholarship Recipient

Only five short years ago, I was standing on the stage at the awards ceremony for the 2017/2018 school year at Wheat Ridge High School. I was one of three recipients of the Patrick Straut Foundation Scholarship that year; disciplined enough to apply for it, fortunate enough to receive it, and similar enough to Patrick to understand why it is so important. 

During my senior year at WRHS, I was granted the life-changing opportunity to participate in the GT center in Room 13, then "taught" (other words, such as "guided", "spearheaded", or "ruled" also come to mind) by Eliot Holmes and Lisa Lee. It was here that I had a safe place in the new and unfamiliar world of public education in the US. I had been homeschooled, living overseas in South America, for most of my school years; needless to say, WRHS was a far cry from my previous years of high school. In the sea of "news" and "unfamiliars" and "what the hell is thats", Mama Lee listened and encouraged and counseled me throughout. 

Aside from the fact that I grew up in a sheltered home in a third world country (an interesting combination, to be sure!), I was also different from my peers in that I had a girlfriend (insert savage high school burn!). My lovely girlfriend lived in Paraguay, approximately 5,500 miles away (not that I was counting ...) and despite our young age, we were already planning on getting married shortly after I graduated (yes, high school). Mama Lee, the amazing and supportive teacher that she was, permitted students to have lunch in her room. I used this brief time, every day, to call my beloved and talk to her during my short lunch period. Of course, Mama Lee forced me to introduce her and often came to say hello (and, obviously, to tease me about it afterwards). In this and many other small and big ways, Mama Lee, Mr. Holmes, and the GT Center supported me through my year at WRHS. 

Today, I am in a very different place than I was on that stage five years ago. I did, in fact, marry the woman of my dreams (I proposed the day after I graduated high school, and we got married exactly one year later). After a tedious and exorbitantly expensive immigration process, I brought her to the US with me, and a little over a year later, our son was born (yes, I was indeed still in college). I graduated a semester early from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in Spanish Education K-12, and the Bilingual / Bicultural Endorsement, and the Culturally Linguistically Diverse Endorsement (a mouthful, to be sure). Currently, I am teaching third grade at a bilingual school, specifically Spanish Language Arts and Social Studies and Science in Spanish. I am finding and creating resources in Spanish for my gifted and talented students who are not identified due to biased laws regarding language (gifted students should qualify as gifted regardless of their first language, in my opinion), and I am grateful for the scholarship I received back in 2018 as well as the ongoing friendship and support I have had with Terri Straut and others. 

My hope is that many other students are able to stand on that stage at WRHS, receiving the support and encouragement that I received. I also hope that, five years later, they can look back and reflect on how they have grown and changed; as I have. Thank you, thank you, thank you.