Melanie Ogg Memorial Scholarship
Melanie Ogg Memorial Scholarship Fund
Established - 2023 // Scioto Foundation Scholarship Application
The eligible applicants will be:
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A graduate of Portsmouth West High School, Scioto County, Ohio
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Majoring in Education or the Performing Arts
Preference for students attending one of the following schools, Shawnee State University, Ohio University and
Muskingum University
The summer of 2023 brought with it the highest high and the lowest low. August 8, 2023 my husband and I welcomed our first child and we said goodbye to my amazing mother the morning of September 28, 2023
My mother was the brightest light in my life and inspired and taught so many other people in our community. She was my best friend, my strength, and my heart. She loved animals, was extremely active in local and state politics in the state of Ohio. She loved teaching, and was a recent retiree for Portsmouth West Elementary School where she taught 3rd grade for 30 + years. She was incredibly creative and crafty and loved fostering creativity with her students and friends. She loved crocheting and sewing, and creating costumes for holidays and performances. She had a beautiful voice and would sing all the time and loved planting flowers. She especially loved being a part of the Shawnee State University Performing Arts Academy and supporting Bone & Fiddle Arts Collective, inc.
My beautiful mother ultimately passed away from a devastating, aggressive, and extremely rare brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Only 350 people in the US get this disease each year. She started complaining of double vision and brain fog in the middle of July and progressively deteriorated day by day. With the help of the fabulous doctors at SOMC she finally made it to Cleveland Clinic and got her unfortunate diagnosis by Case Western Reserve University which is the leading research facility on Prion Diseases. We don’t know how she contracted or developed this heartbreaking disease but we hope that with her organ donation to Case Western Reserve, she will help further research and hopefully save another bright and beautiful soul from this disease.
I am so incredibly sad and angry that my mom has been taken away form her family and community and especially from her granddaughter August Lynn before she ever got to know her. Through my grief and in a effort to continue to shine my mothers light my dad and I have developed the Melanie Ogg Memorial Scholarship Fund to help further the educational goals PWHS students.
