In times of trouble

By Rachel Puckett
John Hardin High School, Elizabethtown

The Governor’s Scholars Program at Bellarmine University is not “just another summer camp.”
It is designed to provide a select group of Kentucky’s top high school seniors with an intensive five-week academic and residential life experience on a college campus. Each student’s life is filled with activity, from dawn till dusk and beyond, seven days a week.
It’s a great honor and great opportunity, but it is demanding. It is stressful.
But for many scholars, the toughest part is being away from home for five weeks. GSP allows family visits on just one day during the program – Family Day. Beyond that, students are restricted to campus and their contact with family and friends is limited to phone calls from the dorm room. The daily advice and comfort of mom and dad, the smell of home-cooking, and the laughter of old friends are a thing of the past.
A scholar’s daily schedule can be quite demanding: Wake up, eat breakfast, go to class, eat lunch, go to class, eat dinner, go to seminar, go to bed. And repeat.
It’s part of the plan. The GSP encourages discipline and independence for success in academics and leadership. But sometimes the plan can fall apart.
For Kristen Dyer, a scholar from Cumberland County High School in Burkesville, that moment came suddenly and dreadfully when she saw a string of messages on her cell phone.
It was the evening of June 22, during the first week of GSP, and she was watching a movie at Cralle Auditorium when Louisville’s tornado sirens began to sound. Kristen and the other scholars in attendance were herded to safety in the basement of Cralle. When the severe storm eased, the scholars were shuttled back to their dorms.
When Kristen got back to her room she found 11 missed calls from her parents.
“I thought they were just worried about me because of the storms,” she said. That night, four tornado touchdowns were confirmed in Jefferson County.
Kristen called her parents, and they told her that her friend Alisha Wright had been killed in an auto accident outside of Burkesville. Kristen was devastated. She had grown up with Alisha, and they played on the same softball team. She was in shock. She felt guilty for being away from home when she needed to be with her family and friends.
“I felt like I should’ve been there the whole time, and it wasn’t real until I got there,” she said after returning from the funeral.
But then Kristen recalled the reaction of her new friends at Bellarmine – the girls in her hall and her Residential Advisor Susan Ahmadi. They came to her and quietly gathered around her in her time of grief.
“Even though they barely knew me, they all comforted and supported me,” she said. “I don’t think I’d still be here if it weren’t for them.”