PHS Senior Academic Awards Night Honors 2011 Pennsbury Graduates

Graduating seniors were honored for their academic, musical, and artistic achievements last Wednesday at Pennsbury High School East. Award-winning seniors and their guests were invited to the ceremony without knowledge of exactly what award(s) they had won. While some knew exactly what awards they would win, others were surprised.

The awards presented by the faculty last Wednesday night included the following categories: special awards, service awards, cultural awards, and academic awards.

The special awards category includes National Merit Commended students and National Merit Scholarship finalists. The seven finalists are Sainath Badugu, Cindy Chang, Jane He, Korinna Light, Emma Rottenborn, Albert Scerbo, and David Sherman. These students originally took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test as juniors together with 1.5 million other students in about 22,000 high schools across the country. Only 1.5% of the students taking the test advance to the Finalist standing.

Other special awards included those given by various organizations such as the American Legion, Army Reserve, Kiwanis Club, McCaffrey's Supermarket, U.S. Marine Corps, Waste Management, and the Zubaida Foundation.

Eleven students received the Exemplary Graduation Project Award. The Graduation Project is a requirement for all high school students in the state of Pennsylvania. While some students use class assignments for their projects, others go the extra mile with more creative endeavors.

Students Jennifer Benson, Cindy Chang, Jared Fallt, Hannah Frank, Suzanne Hart, Jane He, Amanda Herrmann, James Levan, James Montgomery, Timothy Sheaffer, and Katherine Taylor earned this designation with projects that the awards committee selected as exemplary. Violinist and violist Jennifer Benson planned a string quartet concert of chamber music to serenade guests at the PHS Senior Art Show last year.  She programmed the concert, rehearsed the group many times with the help of her advisor, Walt Evanowicz, and presented them at the art show. Benson will attend Slippery Rock University next fall and double major in Music Therapy and Viola Performance. 

Students received numerous academic achievement awards in art, photography, music, health and physical education and all academic subjects. Only two students received two gold medals in the academic awards category. Ravi Solanki received gold medals in science and social studies. Sean Bailey earned gold medals in both instrumental music and music theory. Bailey will be majoring in music performance at Temple University in the fall.

The annual Academic Top Scholars awards highlighted the evening. The school awarded medals to the students who possessed the top twenty highest grade point averages (G.P.A.). Those students include Jane He, J. Matthew Denshaw, John Boccardo, David Sherman, Adriana Scialabba, Andrew Cupo, Brendan R. Wood, Katherine Fields, Sara Liebreich, Kyle MacDonald, Emily Wiegand, Mikayla Borusiewicz, Phillip Shwae, Tyler Holcombe, Wajid Ali, Eva Strauss, Albert Scerbo, Emma Rottenborn, and John Bukowski.

Ravi Solanki, who earned the highest G.P.A. out of a class of 814 graduating seniors, accepted the Academic Excellence Award for his number one ranking, according to information from Pennsbury School District. Solanki received eight awards during the evening including: the Zubaida Foundation Merit Scholarship, Academic Top Scholars award, Debate/Congress award, Mathletics award, Mathematics silver medal, Science gold medal, and the Social Studies gold medal. He plans on attending the University of Cambridge in the U.K. Cambridge was ranked as the number one university in the world according to the 2010-2011 QS World University Rankings.

We congratulate Pennsbury's Senior Class of 2011! In the fall, students will attend a variety of colleges and universities including Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pomona College, University of Pennsylvania, Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University, Tufts University, Bryn Mawr College, University of Chicago, Georgetown University, New York University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Lehigh University.