Boulder City High students finalists in speech and essay contests

Friday, June 19, 2009 | 2:05 p.m.

Victoria Miller took top honors in the district Rotary International essay contest on ethics. She won a $3,000 scholarship.

Read Victoria Miller's winning entry in the George R. Hensel Essay Contest.

Three Boulder City High School students were finalists in the Southern Nevada and Southern California Rotary Clubs’ annual essay and speech contests.

Seniors Victoria Miller and Nia Jennings and junior Dawn Selvig-Harris were among eight students from 69 schools who made the district finals in the contests, Principal Ann Nelson said.

Miller, sponsored by the Noon Rotary, won the George R. Hensel Essay Contest. The topic of the contest was ethics, and Miller wrote about how she resisted an opportunity to cheat and turned herself in when an incorrect answer on a test was not marked as such.

Jennings was a runner-up in that contest.

Selvig-Harris was a runner-up in the speech contest, which used as subject matter the club’s Four-Way Test, which asks if a proposed action is true, fair, whether it will build good will and be beneficial to all concerned.

Both Jennings and Selvig-Harris were sponsored by the Sunrise Rotary.

Miller won a $3,000 scholarship, which she plans to use to attend Brigham Young University in the fall.

Miller has also been awarded a presidential scholarship to the university in Provo, Utah, which she said pays 150 percent of tuition for four years.

That, combined with the Rotary prize and two other scholarships she has won, should cover her first couple of years at the school, she said. After that, she hopes to get departmental scholarships to cover her expenses.

Being the oldest of nine children in the family of Justice of the Peace Victor Miller and his wife, Cora-Lee, she said she knew from the start she had to earn scholarships to go to college.

“I’ve been planning for this since before high school,” she said.

She plans to study Arabic at BYU, she said.

The essay took a couple of hours to write, she said, and she was surprised to learn she had won the district prize.

“I didn’t expect to win, and then I did,” she said.

Selvig-Harris delivered her speech last month in Desert Palms, Calif., at the Rotary International district conference, where she learned she was a runner-up and received a $1,500 award, Nelson said.

Jennings received $500 for her essay.

Nelson said the fact that three of the eight district finalists were from Boulder City speaks well for the school.

“It does say something about the caliber of our students,” she said.