30 Southwest Texans get help
from Student Day offering

Thirty Southwest Texas college students are receiving more than $35,000 in financial aid this school year from The United Methodist Church.
The money—$22,500 in loans and $12,683 in scholarships—comes from denominational sources supported by the annual United Methodist Student Day special offering.
Nov. 27 is the officially designated Sunday for this year’s offering, one of six denominationwide special collections on The United Methodist Church calendar every year. Congregations may accept money for student loans and scholarships on any Sunday before Dec. 31.
Southwest Texas United Methodists gave $8,627 to the Student Day offering in 2004. That was up from $6,829 in 2003 and $6,098 in 2002.
Last year 34 Southwest Texas students received financial aid from the denomination.
Money from the Student Day offering goes to the Office of Loans and Scholarships at the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry in Nashville, Tenn.
The office issued more than $6 million in scholarships and loans to 4,091 students during 2004. That compares to nearly $6 million in aid to 4,028 students in 2003, $7 million in aid to 4,984 students in 2002 and $8.4 million in aid to 5,561 students in 2001.
Declining revenue from the Student Day and World Communion special offerings has reduced available financial aid, said Angella Current-Felder, executive director of the financial aid office.
“At the end of June, after our scholarship committees had reviewed and distributed all the available scholarship dollars for the 2005-06 academic year,” Current-Felder said, “there remained 331 student applicants for which we had no scholarship funds. Seventy-five of these applicants were seminarians, many first-career ministerial students pursuing their master of divinity degrees.”
The Nashville-based higher education board allocated money from non-scholarship sources to provide aid for those 75 students, she said.
“Despite not having sufficient funds to award all the applicants, we celebrate that as of the end of July, the office awarded approximately $3.6 million to 2,543 undergraduates and graduate students,” Current-Felder said.
“By the end of the year, our office should have awarded a total of $4.6 million in scholarships to more than 3,500 students, of which approximately 550 are seminarians enrolled at United Methodist or non-United Methodist theological schools and seminaries.”
The Office of Loans and Scholarships receives money from investments, the World Communion Sunday special offering and other sources in addition to the Student Day offering.
The Nashville office rebates 10 percent of Student Day receipts from Southwest Texas—$863 for last year—to the conference Board of Higher Education and Campus Ministry for local merit scholarships. Those awards are announced each year at the annual conference session.
Christopher James Elford, St. John’s UMC, Corpus Christi, and Sarah Ruth Fry of First UMC, Kings-ville, received the 2004 awards. Elford attends UM-related Southwestern University in Georgetown. Fry attends UM-related McMurry University in Abilene.
United Methodist scholarships and loans are available to students attending accredited institutions. Some scholarships are limited to United Methodist-related schools.
Scholarship and loan applications for the 2006-2007 academic year are to be available in January.

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