The Scholarship Foundation deserves more than 5 stars, it is a community treasure and has helped so many of our kids get to college. My son was lucky enough to receive scholarships which really helped because we have another child in high school now who is planning to go to college too. A college education is very expensive and we are very thankful to the foundation's donors and to the excellent staff who gave us advice on how to do the FAFSA.
My son received several years of scholarships from the foundation and it is a great service to the community. I was very impressed with the professionalism of the staff and everyone was very helpful. It wasnt hard to follow the guidelines to receive his payments, we just had to remember to submit his schedule and grades each term. If you can't do that you don't deserve the award! Whenever I called to ask a question it was taken care of. We were thankful to have the money and it kept my son in school and reduced his loan debt. No place else but Santa Barbara has a foundation like this. We are grateful to them.
The Scholarship Foundation is a great place. I received 4 years of scholarships and it really helped me pay for college. It wasn't hard to apply and the people at the office always helped me out. Sure they have rules to follow, but they are giving away free money!! All I had to do was turn in my schedule and my grades each semester and the Foundation sent my check to the college. I finished at Cal Poly and now I'm living in Paso with a great teaching job. Please support scholarships and this foundation!
I interviewed and evaluated candidates for the Scholarship Foindation for more than five years before, due to a health crisis in my family, my own son applied searching for funding. His experience completely altered my view of the Foundation, although I lay most of the blame to personnel, rather than policy.
The first year, he was disqualified because only one, not the required two, recommendations from teachers and employers (or supervisors of volunteer work) were submitted on his behalf. This is a rather rigid requirement, over which the student does not have complete control, and adds to the burden placed on teachers, who are inundated with requests from the same students for college recs--which can't even be recycled because the Scholarship Foundation has its own forms.
The second year he was told, repeatedly by several layers of staff, including Vicki Wedmore, who oversees the volunteers who conduct interviews, that unless he traveled from Beijing, where he was on a year-long academic program, for an in-person interview in Santa Barbara, his application would again be disqualified. Ms Wedmore repeated this same "policy" to me when I called to follow up on the problem, so I wrote to Colette Hadley, the director, who overrode Wedmore and personally conducted an interview by Skype with him in Beijing.
He was awarded a small ($1,200/ yr) endowed scholarship, not any of the monies set aside for students whose lives have been impacted by cancer (my husband had been undergoing chemotherapy for two years, battling an in curable lymphoma). The interest-free loan programs administered by the Scholarship Foundation with funds from the Santa Barbara Foundation had also been severely curtailed, and he received no loans either. So the Scholarship Foundation award would have had a negligible impact on his ability to attend college, even if it had been fully dispersed.
But we learned at the end of my son's freshman year at the Univeristy of Oregon, where he is in the honors program and the federal flagship program in Chinese and made the dean's list, that only the first quarter's payment was received, $400, without any explanation to the student, the financial aid office at the school, or the parents. My son was informed by Vicki Wedmore that a letter had been sent to our home (where he clearly was not living while attending college) requesting his schedule of classes for the second quarter, not a published requirement of the grant. When he failed to comply, because he did not receive the request, the money was not sent. Period. No second request, use of email for communication, notification of any party: just canceled the award. He reported that Wedmore was hostile to him when he reached her by phone, as she was to me when I followed up, insisting that he had violated the terms of the grant by failing to provide this information and that was that, no review was possible, grant could not be reinstated. But this time when I wrote to Colette Hadley requesting copies of the rule that he had supposedly violated and the Foundation's communications with him regarding this matter, she only responded with one brief email, providing no documentation, and placed the blame solely on the student for the communication error that triggered the problem.
He had also filed his application for a renewal of that scholarship in a timely manner during the winter quarter and provided his transcript, which would provide the information regarding his classes that was the reason given for rescinding the original award. He was never even notified that this application was apparently not processed.
I hope that his experience was unique, but in working with applicants to college as a counselor, I have to warn them not to rely on this source of funding as the selection process is quite subjective and the administration is flawed by obvious personnel problems.
The Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara is 50 years old. It has consistently provided scholarhsips for students of Santa Barbara County with more than 30,000 scholarships totaling $65 million being awarded since 1962. The program is very efficient and I believe over 95% of donations are used directly for scholarhsips. The Foundation bellves that every motivated and deserving student should have a chance at college or a vocational education.