Eight students, citizens and educators were honored for going “above and beyond the call of duty” during the Rotary Club of Lake Oswego’s 2024 Educational Excellence Awards Tuesday, March 19.
This is the eighth year that the Rotary Club has presented the Educational Excellence Awards (formerly known as SASEE awards). Anyone can nominate a potential recipient. An independent panel of judges reviews all of the nominations and determines who the honorees will be.
The student recipients for 2024 were Allison Korkola, Emel Alhumaid and Nidhi Nair. Citizen recipients were Angie Stambuk, Michael Goldsmith and Stephanie Wagner, while the educator recipients were Erin Cealey and John Sperry.
Student and educator recipients each receive $1,000, which they donate to the nonprofit project, school or charity of their choice. Citizen recipients have a $3,000 Rotary scholarship named after them, awarded to a graduating senior from Lake Oswego to help pay for further education.
This year’s awards were presented at a celebration event at Lakewood Center for the Arts on March 19 (after the Review went to press). Recipients received the traditional apple trophy and Lake Oswego School District Superintendent Dr. Jennifer Schiele delivered the keynote speech.
Information about each of the honorees was provided by the Rotary Club of Lake Oswego.
Student recipients
Allison Korkola
Allison Korkola serves as a member of the city of Lake Oswego’s Youth Leadership Council. She is also the founder and president of the WiSTEM (Women in STEM) club at Lake Oswego High School. The WiSTEM club was developed to inspire young women to pursue STEM careers through motivational speakers, study groups and internships.
Allison is the incoming president of Lake Oswego High School National Honor Society, where she currently serves as vice president. She also serves on the Lake Oswego Public Library’s advisory board, supporting projects to improve library services for the Lake Oswego community. She has served on the Library’s Teen Advisory Board (TAB) for the past two years and participates regularly in library programs for young children, including helping with the Summer Library Challenge, The Lunar New Year Festival and others in which the library supports and welcomes children.
She is also a Tryon Creek State Park intern, where she is working to create a summer nature education program for children. She has volunteered at Tryon Creek for the past five years, during which time she has taught children at park interpretive stations about animals and plants. She also volunteers regularly at the visitor center.
Allison is a student teacher for Lake Oswego High School’s LINK Crew Leadership Class. The Link Crew Leadership course aids students in developing skills in communication, teamwork, project planning and implementation, critical thinking and decision making. The LINK Crew is focused on grantmaking and making donations to local nonprofits.
Nidhi Nair
Nidhi Nair serves as the Lake Oswego High School communications secretary of the student government and is also an editor-in-chief of the Lake Views newspaper. She has been involved with the Lake Oswego Youth Leadership Council throughout all four years of high school.
As a student at Lake Oswego Junior High School, Nidhi founded the Random Acts of Kindness Club. She led the club through eighth grade and coached other middle schoolers to continue the club once she moved to high school. She worked with junior high students again during her sophomore year at LOHS when she started a Random Acts of Kindness Club at Lakeridge Middle School.
Since 2020, Nidhi has been a volunteer for Hunger Fighters Oregon, the local food pantry. As the pantry’s Technical Administrator, she assists with behind-the-scenes technology and website management. She’s also one of the organization’s student board members. Within her role at Hunger Fighters, Nidhi has coordinated food drives and made presentations at elementary and middle school assemblies to educate students about the pantry’s mission and activities.
Emel Alhumaid
Emel Alhumaid established the Lake Oswego High School Interact Club two years ago. Since then, as club president, she has worked with her members in their shared goal of service to the community.
Emel has guided the Interact Club to support numerous community initiatives including volunteering with Hunger Fighters Oregon, Free Bikes for Kids and fundraisers for Lake Oswego Meals on Wheels. All of this was accomplished due largely to Emel’s commitment and her passion for humanitarian efforts.
Additionally, Emel inspired a number of students to broaden their perspectives on environmental responsibility at the World Affairs Seminar, an international youth initiative of Rotary International. Its objective is to foster better understanding of world problems for young people from around the globe, using current issues as a learning platform.
Citizen recipients
Stephanie Wagner
Stephanie Wagner has served as Executive Director for Friends of Tryon Creek State Park and Program Director for the Center for Science Education at Portland State University. She has also served on the Parks and Recreation and Natural Resources Advisory Boards for many years.
Stephanie is the current Chair of the Oswego Lake Watershed Council and secretary of the Lake Oswego Sustainability Network. Her interests focus on developing community understanding of the impacts of climate change and actions we can take to mitigate its effects. She is currently working with the Lake Oswego School District on embedding outdoor learning about gardens and watershed function into the STEAM curriculum.
Michael Goldsmith
Michael Goldsmith has been a mentor for Lake Monsters Robotics since 2012. Lake Monsters is part of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization that prepares young people for the future through a suite of inclusive, team-based robotics programs for ages 4-18. He also volunteers at robotics competitions, where teams from around the Pacific Northwest come to compete. He has been recognized by FIRST as Outstanding Volunteer and has been nominated three times for a Woody Flowers Award (recognizing distinguished mentors) by his students.
In the FIRST program students learn to conduct research, fundraise, design, build and showcase their achievements. The team also has an award-winning outreach program, with more than 30 programs in diverse areas such as food insecurity, hospitalized children, human trafficking, people with disabilities, DEI and more. One program, POWR (Patient Outreach With Robots), is conducted in partnership with Doernbecher Childrens Hospital. It impacts 160,000 children annually worldwide.
Angelica Stambuk
Angelica “Angie” Stambuk considers being an advocate for children her mission, her passion and the most important part of her professional life. In 2017, she began her association with Lakewood Center for the Arts. With encouragement from Lakewood’s leadership and staff, she spearheaded the creation of the Youth Outreach Program for the 2018 Festival of the Arts. Through this program, Angie has worked to connect Lakewood Center with underserved youth throughout the region, who have limited access to arts education.
In 2020, with her co-author Selena Jones, Angie wrote and produced “A Week of Color,” a bilingual (English/Spanish) art instruction booklet and video series created to help students express their emotions through art. In 2022, a grant from the Oregon Association of Educational Service Districts made it possible to send 22,000 booklets and art kits to students across the state.
Educator recipients
Erin Cealey
Erin Cealey is a special education teacher at Lake Oswego High School and program coordinator for the Unified Sports Program. In the fall of 2021, she worked at Harmony Academy Charter School, Oregon’s first recovery high school, as their special education teacher on campus. The following year she joined the educator staff at Lake Oswego High School.
In the fall of 2022, Erin demonstrated her passion for sports and her commitment to building a more inclusive community when she helped to establish Lake Oswego High School as the first Unified Champion School with Oregon Special Olympics. Unified Sports is an inclusive sports program that unites Special Olympics athletes (individuals with intellectual disabilities) and partners (individuals without intellectual disabilities) as teammates for training and competition. For the past two years, Lake Oswego has fielded Unified Sports teams in soccer and basketball. Track and field will be added to the Unified Sports program this spring.
John Sperry
For the past five years, John Sperry has been the computer science and engineering teacher at Lakeridge High School and the coach for the Lake Monsters robotics team. A passionate advocate for technology and engineering education, he has pioneered new technology classes at the school. He recently introduced a bridge-building assignment where students will have the opportunity to submit their models to a competition hosted by the University of Portland.
The Lake Monsters team plays a unique role in providing hands-on engineering experience. John has helped the Lake Monsters to raise thousands of dollars from community partners and individual donors to help send the team to regional and world championship events. His dedication serves as an inspiration for Lake Oswego graduates to pursue STEM degrees and careers.
He has actively encouraged Lake Monsters team members to present themselves and their robotics to a variety of audiences, including school board members, parents and prospective students. In the process, they’ve learned to share their passion for technology and engineering at back-to-school nights, open houses, school board meetings and more. Through these activities, Lake Monster team members have learned valuable public speaking and networking skills.
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