Send Rachael Murdock to Indian Springs

Send Rachael Murdock to Indian Springs

From J.W. Carpenter

Rachael Murdock is an outstanding student recently accepted to attend Indian Springs, but without the means to attend. We need 100 alums to help make her dream come true.

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Rachael Murdock, an outstanding young student from Marianna, Arkansas was recently accepted to Indian Springs, but needs a little help to make her dream a reality. Indian Springs changed my life for the better in too many ways to articulate. One of Indian Springs' greatest qualities is its commitment to give world class opportunities to talented kids from all over regardless of their financial background. I taught in Marianna, and know how wonderful the people and students are and the challenges they face. Indian Springs will change Rachael's life by exposing her to resources that match her abilities. All we need are 100 alums to give $80 to help her do it.

Be one of Rachael's 100 champions, and donate $80 today.

For more on Rachael, see the description below from her teachers:

Rachael Murdock travels forty-five minutes each day from Marianna, Arkansas to Helena-West Helena, Arkansas to pursue the best education she has access to in the surrounding area.  Though Rachael’s family has worked hard to provide every educational resource that they have access to in the Mississippi Delta, they are limited by what is available.  Despite the family’s push, Rachael has exhausted the educational resources available to her.  She dreams of playing the saxophone like John Coltrane but lacks a teacher who can devote the one-on-one time to help her develop overtones or improve her sight-reading ability.  She believes strongly in equality and equity but does not have a club or organization that she can join to support her as she confronts injustice in her local community. Rachael loves to read but she has exhausted her options at our small school library and the tiny Marianna library closes before she returns home from school.  Instead, Rachael practices faithfully and reviews YouTube videos to improve her skill on the saxophone. She manages the middle school band in hopes of freeing up her teacher’s time so that she can have more time to learn from him. She participates in student government and offers peer mentoring as needed at school. She begs teacher for access to their book collections and offers to be in charge of ordering for the school library.  She volunteers as a teacher’s aid, office assistant, and cafeteria monitor to repay their generosity. 

Rachael is the rare teenager who seeks more for herself, than her family or her teachers do. Rachael yearns to be with others who are as curious and eager to learn as she is. She imagines attending a school like Indian Springs where she is pushed as much by her peers to grow as much as she pushes herself. Her extended family wonders why she and her parents want this for her when she has access to a fine school. Rachael’s confident reply is that she is convinced that she can do more than she is being asked to do now and that boarding school will provide her with a challenge she has never encountered in her academic work surrounded by a group of young men and women committed to being more academically, musically, socially than she even imagines is available to her. 

After having visited Indian Springs School in seventh grade, Rachael sought out an opportunity to explore what it felt like to attend boarding school. Rachael spent last summer at Deerfield Academy where she realized that boarding school provided her with access to resources she did not imagine schools had and to avail herself to opportunities to continue to grow as a student and a musician.  

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