Blair High School Junior Wins $10,000 in Essay Contest

Isabel E. Hendrix-Jenkins, a junior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, has won a $10,000 scholarship for her essay about growing income disparity, Montgomery County Public Schools announced Monday.

She is one of four MCPS students selected as winners in the 2012 Junior Achievement Essay Competition. Hendrix-Jenkins placed second in the state.

The competition, coordinated by Junior Achievement of Greater Washington, asked high school students from Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC to compete for scholarships by writing a 1,000- to 1,500-word essay in response to the following question: “How can the country readily and realistically tackle growing income disparity?”

One of the ways Hendrix-Jenkins suggests is to bolster vocational training programs in public schools, she writes in her essay:

Schools today are geared toward readying students for a general four year college experience—the vocational training programs once so popular in American high schools have all but disappeared. These specific courses train a student in one field or trade, from plumbing to drafting to computer programming. This training is the key to providing low income students with jobs and helping poor families break the cycle that is widening income disparity so dramatically in the United States. 

Daniela Hernandez-Fujigaki, a sophomore at Clarksburg High School, was selected as the grand prize winner. Samuel A. Scimemi, a junior at Walt Whitman High School, and Nicole M. Obongo, a junior at Northwest High School, were selected as state winners, as was Hendrix-Jenkins.

Hendrix-Jenkins will be honored with the other scholarship recipients at a ceremony on June 5 in Washington, DC. To read the winning entries, visit the Junior Achievement website.

The competition is sponsored by David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and managing director of The Carlyle Group, a global asset management company.