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GMEA Scholarships
The association is privileged to support students in their own extracurricular
pursuits in a variety of ways. GMEA provides Mifflin’s Future Educators
of America (FEA) with an annual stipend. These funds are used to enable
future educators to attend the FEA national convention and to provide for
senior awards at the end of each year. Additional funds are used to defray
the costs of FEA programs and activities throughout the school year.
We also place an advertisement in the scholastic football program, which
benefits the Governor Mifflin Boosters Club. In order to ensure that students
have a safe and wholesome destination after the Junior-Senior Prom, the
GMEA additionally contributes funds to the school-sponsored post-prom party.
In addition to its participation in community service organizations, GMEA
members also seek to support their students’ postsecondary educational goals
through the GMEA Scholarship Fund. Established in 1978 when its first
$400 scholarship was awarded, the fund has now dispensed $54,750 in scholarship
monies to graduating seniors for their studies at four-year colleges or universities.
Since 2002, the GMEA Scholarship Fund has given $2,000 scholarships to three
members of Governor Mifflin’s graduating class each year. The GMEA Scholarship
Fund also sponsors the Outstanding in Yearbook Award ($100) and the Christa
McAuliffe Challenger Award ($250), each awarded annually to a deserving
graduating senior.
The GMEA Scholarship Fund is supported wholly by donations from the
association’s membership, and through fundraisers. The GMEA Craft Bazaar,
though no longer held, was traditionally a significant source of scholarship
monies, and each year at July’s Mifflin Community Days celebration, two
stands donate money earned to the scholarship fund. This year, with the kind
permission of Governor Mifflin School District’s administrators, GMEA has
instituted a Blue Jeans on Payday Fridays program, whereby association
members who pay $20 are encouraged to wear blue jeans every other Friday
for the entire school year. This initiative, has raised $5,675 in donations for
the GMEA Scholarship Fund. According to former scholarship fund administrator
and high school special education teacher Judy Long, “We receive letters from the
recipients every year expressing their gratitude for our assistance in helping them to
achieve their goal of a college education.”
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