The Maecenas Fund > Current Newsletter

To all our friends:

In early November, fellow director Chuck Bush and I went to Phoenix to confirm our commitment to Carl Hayden High School.

In addition to meeting with school principal, Stephen Ybarra, we spent the day with teachers Allan Cameron and Fredi Lajvardi in their classes and with their students. As you may recall, these are the advisors to the school robot club, the one that beat MIT in an underwater robot competition in the middle of 2004.

While they are modest about their achievements, we think of them as truly inspired in their efforts to make a difference for the kids whose lives they touch.

Chuck and teacher Allan Cameron talk about the plans for this year's MATE underwater ROV competition with Senior Luis Gutierrez listening.

While the rule book hasn't been issued for this year's competition, the club has already begun developing a smaller and lighter ROV than the one they finished third with last year.

Seniors Cristian Arcega and Luis Gutierrez are working through their lunch hour on this year's ROV. They continue to make all their components smaller, lighter and more durable each year.

Their drive and intensity are a delight to experience.

When I visited Carl Hayden last April on a preliminary visit to check out the "reality quotient" of the Wired article, I came away with a tremendously warm feeling about the students, their spark, the sparkle in their eyes, their motivation and the tremendous dedication of their teachers.

As Chuck and I left school in the late afternoon to gather our thoughts before dinner, I asked him what he thought about what we had seen. There was a short pause while he thought for a moment, and then he played back to me almost verbatim the thoughts and feelings I had on my first (and this one, too!) visit. It was if he had been reading my thought balloons.

It is such an incredibly rewarding experience to spend a day with these students and see how much drive they have and feel like we can help them pursue their educational goals.

One of the bonuses of our recent visit to the school was the opportunity to meet Katie Sisulak from the Admissions Office of Arizona State University in nearby Tempe. The President of ASU is on a mission to enlarge the school substantially and has established an outreach program to high schools that have not historically sent many of their graduates on to college. Our hope is to coordinate our scholarship awards with ASU and increase the leverage of both of our missions.

At dinner, the two teachers asked us point blank what our plans are with regard to scholarship awards this year. Here is what we told them: we will award a minimum of two, four-year scholarships this year. Whether or not we can do more will depend upon new contributions and joint efforts we are working to establish with colleges to help leverage our scholarship awards.

These guys are committed and don't hold back!

We are in the last stages of finalizing the Fund's scholarship application form, and expect to have it ready to send out by mid-December.

Chuck and I will return to Phoenix in February to interview scholarship applicants, with an eye toward sending out our decisions by early March.

Best regards,

Peter Gaskins Director