The Ruby Rutnik Scholarship Fund has announced that this year’s winners are Jordyn Powell and Kitori Thomas.
Powell graduated in May as the valedictorian of her class at the V.I. Montessori School and Peter Gruber International Academy, while Thomas is entering her senior year as a marketing major at the University of the Virgin Islands.
An internship with Barefoot Design Group on St. John last summer gave Powell a taste of her future career. This fall, she will enter Princeton University as an architecture major. Powell said she has always enjoyed looking at the “big, fancy, extravagant houses” on St. John, but she also appreciates the way “architecture tells the story of the culture.”
Powell began her education as a 2-year-old enrolled at the Montessori School on the east end of St. Thomas. She recalls being escorted there – and sometimes carried – by her grandfather Julian Harley in the days before the school provided bus service from the ferry. She spent the next 15 years growing with the school as it expanded to offer an International Baccalaureate (IB) program.
“If I were to create a short list of my favorite students who were also among my best students, Jordyn would be at the top of the list,” said Bradford Capozzi, one of her IB instructors. Citing her project comparing the Canadian rapper Powfu to the Greek poet Sappho as an example, he said, “Her work is consistently innovative and thought-provoking, and always applicable to the trends that impact our world today.”
In addition to studying hard, Powell has served as a youth church leader at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, volunteered at the Humane Society on St. Thomas, and worked as a busser at La Tapa Plage. She cites her grandparents Julian and Patrice Harley, and father Antonio Powell, mother Julice Holder, and stepfather Melville Holder, as inspirations and sources of support throughout the years.
Kitori Thomas also cites her family as a source of inspiration to her. “My mother, Melchia Athanase, has always been there for me, and my father Kyle Thomas and my boyfriend have always encouraged me to stay in school,” she said, even as the long commute to attend evening classes at UVI became tiring.
Thomas, who graduated from the Gifft Hill School on St. John, will soon begin her last year at UVI, where a favorite class was international marketing. After she earns her degree, she wants to put her skills in marketing to work and “get a feel what it’s like to live someplace else.”
She is very active in the youth group at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church on St. John and works nearly full-time at the Caravan Gallery. Emily Pokorny, her supervisor, said, “Kitori is meticulous and task-oriented….Her thoroughness shines through in the high standards that she sets for herself.”
Janet Cook-Rutnik, president of the Ruby Rutnik Scholarship Fund, said the selection committee was particularly pleased to find two such worthy candidates for the annual scholarships named in honor of her daughter, Ruby, who died in a car accident.
“This year marks the 29th year without Ruby; on April 9 she would have been 50 years old,” said Cook-Rutnik. “This is hard for us to contemplate as our forever-young girl was a 21-year-old senior at American University at the time of her death.”
In 1997, an annual softball tournament was organized for female high school students throughout the Virgin Islands as a way to fund the scholarship.
In 2014, the Rutnik family decided to end the tournaments and use the funds already raised to establish an endowment through the Gifft Hill School on St. John. This arrangement was especially appropriate as Ruby Rutnik was one of the original preschool students when the school was founded as the Pine Peace School in 1978.
The goal of the scholarship is to ease the burden of paying for higher education, especially for those attending colleges and universities off-island. Since its inception, the fund has awarded more than $200,000 to over three dozen recipients.
Those wishing to contribute to the scholarship fund are asked to make their checks payable to Gifft Hill School, noting RRSF on the bottom of the check, and send by mail to: GHS, 5000 Estate Enighed #356, St. John, VI 00830.
St. Croix Source
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