An Elida student gets national recognition for overcoming obstacles in her life to graduate high school.
Laura Johnson, also known as Gail, was named the National Exchange Club's ACE Award winner. With the award, she gets a $15,000 scholarship to continue her education. ACE stands for “Accepting the Challenge of Excellence", and Johnson did just that. After growing up in a dysfunctional family, she struggled in school, but when she went into the foster care system in her sophomore year, she was taken in by first time foster parents Dave and Nancy O'Keefe. With their guidance, she turned her grades around and is looking to attend The Ohio State University in Lima to major in social work. Besides the national scholarship, she received $700 from the Lima Exchange Club and $1,000 from the district. This is the first time that a Lima Club ACE award winner has won the national award.
Media Release from Lima Exchange Club 7/26/20
Rare National Honor for Lima Exchange Club
On Saturday July 25, during it’s virtually held national convention, the National Exchange Club announced that Lima’s local A.C.E. award winner was selected from entries all over the country to receive the National Exchange Club A.C.E. Scholarship Award for 2020.
As this year’s national selectee, Gail Johnson, a recent graduate of Elida High School, will receive a $15,000.00 scholarship to further her college education. Added to the $1000.00 scholarship she received in June for being the Ohio/West Virginia District A.C.E. winner, and the $700.00 she received last March from the Lima Exchange Club for being it’s local A.C.E. selectee, Johnson will now have $16,700.00 in scholarship money to be used at the college or university of her choice.
A.C.E. stands for Accepting the Challenge of Excellence. It is a program sponsored each year by the National Exchange Club to recognize high school students who have made a dramatic change in their attitude and performance during high school - changes that then enabled the students to overcome adversities and prepare for graduation.
The two key objectives of the A.C.E. program are to help students overcome hardships and get back on track toward a high school diploma, and to recognize a group of students who are often overlooked for their accomplishments.
Gail Johnson grew up in suburban Cincinnati in a dysfunctional family that left her many challenges to overcome. As Gail was finishing her sophomore year in high school with little academic success, Dave and Nancy O’Keefe of Lima were finishing training to become foster parents and, through the grace of God, took in Gail as their first foster child in March, 2018. Gail’s father had died, she had been legally given up by her birth mother, and she had already been in one foster home before finding a loving and supportive fit in Lima.
Nancy O’Keefe teaches eighth grade at Elida and Dave is a corrections officer for the Allen/Oakwood Correctional Facility. They openly enrolled Gail at Elida High School and, with the help of her new and stable family unit, she gradually blossomed into an excellent student. She worked overtime to earn enough credits to graduate on schedule from Elida in 2020 and she plans to enroll at OSU-Lima and major in social work.
This marks the first time in the 61-year history of the Lima Exchange Club that one of its local youth honorees has earned a National Award. Congratulations to Gail Johnson for overcoming many serious hurdles in her life and thanks to Dave and Nancy O’Keefe for being very special foster parents.
