Julie Zeglen, Port Richmond Star

It was just an­oth­er Tues­day for Moth­er of Di­vine Grace eighth-grader Rene Peter­man–un­til she learned that she had won $12,000 in high school schol­ar­ship money.

Rene won a schol­ar­ship from the Saint John Vi­an­ney Schol­ar­ship Pro­gram that will total $3,000 per year for each yeah that she at­tends an arch­dioces­an high school. She earned it based on her per­form­ance on the Con­nelly Found­a­tion’s Saint John Neu­mann Ex­am and her grades.

Rene is one of eight stu­dents this year who won the schol­ar­ship, out of ap­prox­im­ately 900 who sat the for ex­am. She will use the award to at­tend Little Flower Cath­ol­ic High School.Last Tues­day morn­ing, March 3, rep­res­ent­at­ives from the Schol­ars Pro­gram vis­ited the school, 2612 E. Mon­mouth St., in Port Rich­mond to present the award dur­ing a school­wide as­sembly in the church. Among them were the chair­man of the pro­gram’s board, Mi­chael Greenly, and board mem­ber Cosmo DeN­ic­ola, who at­ten­ded Moth­er of Di­vine Grace in the 1960s and is now a part-own­er of the Phil­adelphia Soul foot­ball team. The stu­dents–in­clud­ing Ren&ea­cute;e–were not told the reas­on for the as­sembly be­fore­hand. Greenly opened the as­sembly by dis­cuss­ing the im­port­ance of edu­ca­tion and ask­ing the teach­ers to stand up for a round of ap­plause.

Then, DeN­ic­ola spoke of grow­ing up in the neigh­bor­hood and at­tend­ing the school as well as how those ex­per­i­ences in­flu­enced his cur­rent suc­cess.“The reas­on I talk about all those neat things that I’ve done,” he said, “is they all came as a res­ult of con­fid­ence and edu­ca­tion that I re­ceived here, and the spir­itu­al­ity and the faith that grew as a res­ult of com­ing to MDG.”

DeN­ic­ola also shared ad­vice about the im­port­ance of read­ing, work­ing hard, pray­er and com­munity. Re­gard­ing the Moth­er of Di­vine Grace com­munity in par­tic­u­lar, he said, “The MDG fam­ily will be with you in bad times. What you’re learn­ing in the com­munity and what you have here is so power­ful [and can help you] when you’re chal­lenged in the world.”