BY KAREN BOSSICK

Two Sun Valley Community School seniors have received some lofty academic recognition.

• Senior Ben Colbeck has been named a National Merit Scholarship finalist. One of 16,000 semifinalists named in September, he now is eligible to win a $2,500 National Merit Scholarship this spring.

  More than 1.5 million juniors from 21,000 high schools entered the 2022 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2020 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants.

  The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.

• Senior Maria Mendoza has been named a semifinalist for the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s Cooke College Scholarship.

She was one of 411 student semifinalists chosen from more than 5,300 applications. Six finalists will be chosen to receive the scholarship, which provides high-achieving students with financial need up to $55,000 annually for four years of college to enable them to attend a top college or university.

Mendoza was one of two Idahoans selected in a pool that included applicants from all 50 state, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands and American Samoa. Scholarships are awarded without respect to religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, geographic region, race or ethnicity.