For LCPS seniors, quality wins highlight scholarship success
In the past decade, the value of scholarships offered Lenoir County Public Schools’ graduating seniors has more than tripled, hitting a high mark this year of $37 million. Quantity is only half the story, however. In racking up impressive dollar totals year after year, LCPS graduates have proved to be strong competitors for the biggest and best merit scholarships around.
Since 2016, that record of scholarship success includes four Morehead-Cain Scholarships to UNC-Chapel Hill, two Park Scholarships to NC State, five Goodnight Scholarships to NC State, five full-ride scholarships to North Carolina A&T, seven full-tuition scholarships to East Carolina University, a Levine Scholarship to UNC-Charlotte, Campbell University’s top scholarship and the B.N. Duke Scholarship to Duke University.
The effort, the poise and the credentials – academic, extracurricular and otherwise – of those winners get the lion’s share of the credit, of course; but their ending up as winners, ending up in the top 2 or 3 percent of thousands of applicants, confirms the value of a process in place at LCPS high schools that aligns students’ goals with scholarships that could help make that future real.
It’s a team effort involving students and school counselors that begins far ahead of graduation.
“We have to help guide students long before senior year,” Candi Tyndall a veteran counselor at South Lenoir High School, said. “We talk about their interests and their goals, make sure they’re getting in the correct classes, helping them with leadership opportunities, helping them with extracurricular involvement, just going ahead and starting to build that meaningful resume early.”
Tyndall knows what she’s about. A high school counselor for 13 years she was honored this past school year as the best in the state by the North Carolina Association for Teaching, Learning, and Leading. In the spring, she and fellow South Lenoir counselor Kelee Moore celebrated the selection of Cody Baggett as a Morehead-Cain Scholar, the winner of a scholarship valued at $140,000 for in-state students and the survivor of a months-long process that begins with about 2,500 applicants and ends with about 75 awardees.
LCPS’s traditional high schools –South Lenoir, North Lenoir and Kinston – have each graduated at least one Morehead-Cain Scholar since 2016. Three more students – from Kinston, North Lenoir and Early College –were named finalists. Park Scholarships, the most competitive at NC State, were awarded to LCPS students in 2025 and 2023 and since 2019 four other students were named finalists.
All were nominated by their schools after going through an internal selection process.
Typically, scholarship selection committees at the high schools identify interested students, their qualifications and their ambitions through that in-house application as juniors, according to Tyndall. Students who have the best chance of success are “well-rounded,” she said, those who combine a strong academic record with a history of school and community activities, particularly those that demonstrate leadership. “I think a lot of the scholarships are looking at leadership, not just being president of SGA but doing something meaningful with that leadership,” Tyndall said.
Early in the senior year, the schools’ scholarship committees allocate nominations to the major scholarships – Morehead-Cain, Park, Levine, A&T’s three full-ride scholarships, among others – based on the number of nominations each school is allowed. Students who were not nominated but remain interested in pursuing a particular scholarship are encouraged to self-nominate.
Either way, students get help from counselors, other faculty, former scholarship winners and community members in bolstering their writing and interview skills. “They need to have a good story,” Tyndall said of scholarship seekers, “and they need to be able to convey that story through written language and verbally. That’s how they present themselves.”
Davion Koonce, a member of Kinston High’s Class of 2026, can make an objective judgment about what that kind of help means. He enrolled at KHS as a sophomore after spending his freshman year at a school in Virginia. At Kinston, he found a faculty and staff much more involved in helping students succeed.
“I definitely believe at Kinston High School I was pushed to do my best,” Davion said. “I definitely noticed how the staff does care a lot about each student. If you’re reaching out to them and they see you want help and want to succeed, they are going to be there to help you.”
The result? Davion and KHS classmate Melondia Crouell each won Dowdy scholarships to North Carolina A&T. The Dowdy is one of three full-ride scholarships that A&T offers to fewer than 60 students each year. Since 2021, five LCPS graduating seniors have been awarded one of those scholarships.
The roll call of top scholarship winners from the Class of 2026 also includes Madeline Gilmore of North Lenoir High, awarded a Goodnight Scholarship to NC State, and Taryn Barnett of Lenoir County Early College High School, winner of a J.A. Campbell Scholarship to Campbell University. Since 2022, five LCPS graduating seniors have been named Goodnight Scholars and four more reached the finalist stage. Taryn’s Campbell Scholarship is one of only five awarded each year.
Two June graduates at North Lenoir High were named NC Teaching Fellows, a scholarship program designed to put future teachers on a track to North Carolina classrooms. LCPS has produced five Teaching Fellows since 2020.
All that success constitutes an impressive spreadsheet of achievement, compiled from school and district records, but it is hardly inclusive. Many other lesser known but still lucrative scholarships have rewarded the efforts of LCPS graduating seniors, among them ECU’s Maynard Scholarship for prospective teachers, the Chancellor’s Science Scholarship to UNC and the Barnhill Scholarship to UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. Then there are the five students chosen as state representatives in the competition for the title of U.S. Presidential Scholar – and South Lenoir’s Rachel Noble, a Park Scholar, who was named one of about 120 national winners in 2025.
School counselors revel in their role as guides in the scholarship hunt, but credit for bagging the big ones goes to the students, according to Tyndall. “They put in the work. That’s something they may not always get credit for,” she said. “They have to do these applications, they have to balance their coursework, balance athletics, balance part-time work. They amaze me every day. I wonder when they have time to sleep.”
Over the past decade, LCPS graduating seniors have proved to be strong competitors for top merit scholarships. Davion Koonce and Melondia Crouell of Kinston High School extended that record of scholarship success as 2026 winners of full-ride scholarships to North Carolina A&T University. They were recognized for their win at a recent meeting of the Lenoir County Board of Education, shown with, from left, board member John Wiggins, KHS Principal Kellan Bryant and LCPS Superintendent Brent Williams.
