What a terrible shock. I came home from work to catch this report on Channel 7, the accidental death of Roshundalyn Scribner. The top student in Hall High’s senior class was killed in an accident on the streets of Little Rock. She was trying to move her disabled car off Markham Street.

Not more than two hours before, I’d entered her name into the list of nominees for our annual Arkansas Times Academic All-Star Team, which will be announced in April. She was a strong candidate. She’d apparently been meeting shortly before the accident with a representative of Yale University, which she was thinking about attending. Hall High’s female academic all-star nominee last year and our 2006 cover girl, Naomi Bland, also went to Yale.

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Now Roshundalyn is gone. A bright light has been extinguished. She would have been a strong contender for our all-star team.

UPDATE: Some information from her Academic All-Star nomination:

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He gradepoint was 4.269, tops in her class of 250. She earned it, carrying all Advanced Placement courses — English, calculus, biology, European history, psychology and Spanish 5. She’d won her school’s Harvard Book Award as the top student and also the Rensselaer Award for Math and Science. She was a state poetry contest winner and 1st-place finisher in Spanish in the Foreign Language Festival.

She was student council president and about that work, she wrote: “A leader hears, but a great leader listens. A leader talks, but a great leader communicates effectively. A leader sees through her eyes, but a great leader sees through the eyes of the community. … My experiences have simply enabled me to grow and I am still growing. My experiences are enabling me to blossom into a determined individual who is aware of her goals and who plans to reach them.”

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Said her counselor Linda Jones: “When someone talks about the future being in the hands of our young people, I certainly hope they are referring to Roshundalyn Scribner. I would feel totally secure knowing that my children and grandchildren would live in a country led by young men and women with the moral courage, integrity, intelligence and resilience that Roshundalyn exemplifies.”

 

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