Unsung Hero

At Pasco High School, when Courtney was a Senior, they started awarding Golden Bulldogs as the academic awards.  It is really kind of prestigous as only one Golden Bulldog is given per grade per subject.  The student's must be nominated by their teachers and then each group of teachers decides who will be the actual winner.  Mr. Shimek - the PHS leadership teacher is the one who has been in charge of this for the many years this has been going on.  (Interesting side note- he claims to bleed purple, but now he works at Chiawana.)   Here are some pictures from May 2010 - the last Pasco Bulldog in our family.  Zach has received a grand total of 6 Bulldogs for his years at Pasco High School.  Four of the awards were for math - one for each year.  We have a total of 12 on our piano.  Mr. Shimek asked Kylee at CHS how all of our dogs are doing.  The Anderson family has the most dogs in PHS history.  Pretty cool.

The next group of pictures are from the Zach Night - I mean Senior Awards Night.   He was called down there so many times you would have thought it was his night.

Zach went up there for National Honor Society Award, Key Club and Kiwanis Scholarships, Superintendent Award, Top 15 % Award (He was Number 3 in the graduating class - number 2 took underwater basket weaving type classes to ensure that she kept a high GPA.  She even said so.).  The last picture was only Zach - no one every joined him as he was the runner up for the Washington State Scholar for our district.  There are very few that Pasco High has ever even been nominated for, so this was really a great honor.

You may wonder why I entitled this Unsung Hero.  Well, Zach never tells anyone about his accomplishments.  And he rarely takes credit for his good work.  At one of his scholarship lunches, each student was asked to share information about them.  They all got up and told their class rank, what they did as extracurricular activities, how much service they gave, what hard classes they took, all the awards and accolades they recieved, how wonderful they are, etc.  Zach was last to speak.  Instead of talking about his GPA, his golden bulldogs, his black belt kn taekwon do, his Eagle Scout award, etc. he gets up there and thanks his teachers and parents for helping him to be successful and how he owes it all to them.