The 2016 Happy Montessori Scholarship was awarded to Addie Ronis at the festive Community Awards ceremony at Schreiber High School on June 8. Addie, who has an impressive resume of activities and academic credentials, was selected by a committee of Schreiber staff.
The Happy Montessori School awards a scholarship to an alumnus who represents the school’s mission of encouraging curiosity, empathy, and engagement with the world, in addition to a willingness to work hard to achieve one’s goals. Addie embodied these values and the school was proud to honor her.
In addition to being a good student, Addie demonstrates the kindness that Happy Montessori wishes to foster. During her summers, she has volunteered at an orphanage in Peru and at a school for impoverished children in Ghana.
Addie’s wisdom and insight was recognized by a different Schreiber committee which, independent of her Happy Montessori award, selected her to be this year’s graduation speaker. The words of her speech are an important lesson to parents and children, high schoolers and preschoolers: “Nobody knows you better than you know yourself…we definitely don’t hold self-esteem as high up on the priority list as it should be, if we’ve let other people determine our value, sometimes in numbers. You are far more than the grades you receive in school.”
Addie plans to study Elementary Education, and her philosophy of education is one that Happy Montessori is proud to embrace: “Our formative years in school…should be spent building up confidence and forming opinions and learning about ourselves and about the world.” This belief is represented in the work that happens at Happy Montessori and symbolized in Scholarship recipients, but shared by all Happy Montessori graduates.
Past recipients of the Happy Montessori Scholarship are Avanti Shroff, currently a student at Columbia University, and David Wolmark, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Addie, the third recipient of the scholarship started by Amrit Sethi, founder of the Happy Montessori School, will be a freshman at Guilford College in the fall.
