SEQUIM — At the end of a tragic year, Sequim High School counselor Mitzi Sanders is surrounded by lights, fierce lights she has helped to shine.
“Do you see that boy? I love that boy,” she said when a slim youth walked into the library below her office early Thursday afternoon.
He’s Jordan Bush, one of the 110 Sequim High seniors who won a total of $2.4 million in scholarships this year.
That amount is a record for Sanders, who since 1999 has been teaching students how to go after their wildest dreams, via scholarship and college applications.
She’s also taught them how to “listen to your heart,” as a poster on her door reads.
Bush’s heart is in the fire service.
He plans to attend Peninsula College and become a firefighter, Sanders said; among other awards, he is receiving a $1,000 scholarship from the Clallam County Professional Firefighters Union Local 2933.
Sanders has also helped the class of 2009 win nearly $310,000 in scholarships from local organizations, plus awards from Yale, the University of Notre Dame and dozens of other schools.
This year, two seniors are receiving the Ben Merscher Memorial Scholarship, in honor of Sanders’ son, who was killed at age 25 on Oct. 7.
Merscher was driving on U.S. Highway 101 west of Sequim when Engre Louise Brown’s vehicle hit him head-on. Her blood alcohol level was 0.18 percent, more than twice the legal limit of .08 percent. On May 20, Brown pleaded guilty in Clallam County Superior Court to vehicular homicide and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Sanders took time off, to return just before Christmas to help students compile their scholarship notebooks, the portfolios they present to would-be benefactors.
When she was back in her office, “a lot of kids came forward,” Sanders recalled. “They said they had been thinking of me. They asked how I was doing, and if I elaborated, they were good listeners.”
Robbie Blenk, a senior who lost his father, Stephen Blenk, in an auto accident in November 2004, was one of the first to ask, “Ms. Sanders, how are you feeling?”
Not very well, she told him. Blenk simply wrapped her up in a hug.
Now that the school year is at an end — graduation ceremonies begin at 6 p.m. today on Sequim High’s football field — Sanders is thinking about her students’ first steps toward the futures of their choosing.
She’s also thinking about Ben.
“You watch the kids opening up,” she said, “when they discover what they want to do and where they want to go. They get letters of recommendation, and I’ve seen students break down in tears, when they read about themselves,” in descriptions written by those who believe in them.
As Sanders guides her students through the ever more complex college and scholarship application process, she teaches if you don’t ask, then you won’t receive, and you can move on from disappointment.
“I hate it when I have to give bad news, if they didn’t get a scholarship or a college denied them,” she said, but “there are always options. Plans change, and you can change with them.”
Nothing is cast in stone, she gently reminds them. “There are lots and lots of opportunities out there.”
Scholarship recipients
Sanders sat down with her daughter Ashley Merscher, 23, to look through the notebooks from students applying for the first $1,000 Ben Merscher Memorial Scholarship. Together they chose Olivia Boots, who plans to attend the University of Washington, and Amanda Tjemsland, who is headed for Yale.
“Ben was someone who just loved to learn. He took his college education seriously,” Sanders said of her son, who earned a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Oregon in Eugene and later studied at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark.
“He loved to be around people. He was a very giving person . . . when he lived in Eugene, he would tutor students in math and science,” she said.
After Ben’s death, Sanders received letters from many of the people he had met while traveling across Europe.
“I got cards from them, with little stories about him. It was such a tribute.”
The two young women receiving the Merscher scholarship share Ben’s qualities, she added.
“They are very intelligent, but they take time for people. He would have picked them.”
Sanders herself is considering a trip this summer to Denmark, to see the places her son saw. His brother Casey, now 22, visited him there, and he was planning to take his mother.
“We talked about it until the day he died,” she said.
Sanders isn’t sure yet, though, whether she’ll be able to make the trip or who might travel with her.
For today, at least, she’s busy seeing seniors off. When Sanders walks into the hall, students turn high-wattage smiles on her, and she can’t get to the exit without long hugs from two of them.
Paul Harris Fellowship
She’s also still getting over a complete surprise from last week. On June 3 during Sequim High’s Scholarship Night, the annual celebration of scholarship recipients, Sanders received the Rotary Club’s Paul Harris Fellowship.
Rotarian Al Friess described her work before announcing Sanders’ name, so she didn’t know what was happening until she heard him mention the creation of “a thousand scholarship notebooks.”
“Our honoree has helped raise over $10 million in the last seven years,” Friess noted. “Our honoree has contacted every funding source near and far, days, nights, weeks, by phone, mail and in person . . . to generate the resources for deserving, and often times needy students, and has done so with great success.”
The Paul Harris award, named for the founder of Rotary, includes an appropriate gift: a $1,000 scholarship awarded to a student in Sanders’ name.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
