The Wieckowski Scholarship Awards Well-rounded Seniors

Photo from Unsplash | Scholarships such as this one reward students for their hard work by helping them pay for college.

The Wieckowski Family Scholarship is awarded to two to three seniors every year, and this scholarship is specifically catered towards seniors graduating from John F. Kennedy High School. There are 19 applicants from the graduating class of 2026, a high batch compared to other years. Senator Robert A. Wieckowski conducted interviews with all 19 seniors at the Career Center during the end of August.

“I’m looking at diversity and… sort of the whole package. Each year is a different mix. So this is 19, so it’s going to be a tougher decision to sort of wean that down,” remarked Wieckowski.

Wieckowski expands proudly on the fact that people usually never meet their state senator, and he is just around the neighborhood. Seniors can look in and see that successful people can come out of Kennedy as well as if they came from Palo Alto or Moraga, the usually higher-end living area.

The scholarship started as an idea when Wieckowski was on the city council of Fremont during Christmas time. His family would gather, and somebody brought up that a student would come to college and find out there were unexpected dues to be paid outside of tuition, like an ASB card that could cost $250 at the time.

Wickowski explained, “So, I talked with my brothers and sisters and said, ‘Well, we’re all doing well, why don’t we chip in some money and come up with, like, 1500 bucks just to make it a little easier on folks,’”

Joyce Wieckowski Steakley, the senator’s sister, would grade everybody’s application and calculate a score based on the GPA, sport participation, and committee engagement of the applicant. An Excel spreadsheet would be drawn up to also review the writing skill of the applicant based on their essay. The family conducts a Zoom meeting where they discuss everything else including how the applicant’s interview went and how compelling the applicant’s story is.

“This person is going to Ohlone, but they can’t go unless they get $1500, and here’s a kid going to Harvard, and he’s already got $35000 worth of scholarships. That’s not scientific. It’s one of these things where you try to look at the whole process,” revealed Wieckowski. “Some years, we’ve done three, because it was just… a disagreement. Everyone had a favorite.”

The Wieckowski family finds Kennedy to be a tight-knitted community. The brothers jokingly held onto a ‘senior-sophomore’ dynamic in high school 40 years later, where the jock upperclassmen brothers  stared down at the underclassmen. One sister, Carol, graduated as  valedictorian of her class. Wieckowski expressed that Kennedy promotes friendship as a value, that kids come out either hoping to be friends forever or learning to make friends out of all sorts of situations.

Wieckowski believed roundedness is the star quality to becoming a Wieckowski Family scholar: “Trying to find that blend of kids that will say ‘I do this, I do that.’ Your generation is much more ambitious and interested in trying things. Having a balance of all of these different things is what makes someone competitive.”