A Scholar and a Role Model

Public schools in Los Angeles need all the good news they can get these days, and last week they received good news indeed: A San Fernando Valley native and public school alumna won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.

Twenty-one-year-old Melissa Sturm, a senior at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, attended Portola Middle School, North Hollywood High School and, for her final two years, Taft High. She was one of 32 college students from across the country named a Rhodes scholar this year.

Sturm is recalled by Taft teachers and counselors as someone with a sense of focus and purpose unusual even for adults, but especially for high school kids. Brilliant but unaffected, she was well-liked by other Taft students.

Among her accomplishments, in addition to making straight A’s and playing the violin, she organized volunteer-staffed reading and drama programs at the West Valley Boys & Girls Club in Woodland Hills.

“She was really able to connect with the kids there,” Sturm’s former Taft counselor, Linda Zimring, told The Times. “She didn’t come from a privileged background.”

While some West Valley students got their own cars at 16 that were better than many teachers’, Sturm had a refreshing lack of interest in the new and the trendy.

“So many kids are I-directed,” said Zimring. “Melissa is other-directed.”

If Zimring had one wish, short of cloning the young scholar, it would be for West Point to free Sturm up to talk to school students before she takes off for Oxford.

Can such focus and purpose be taught? Zimring credits Sturm’s sense of commitment to parents Art and Linda Sturm of Chatsworth, but says schools can help develop such traits if the seeds are there. And other students can be inspired by Sturm’s example.

As for the Valley’s public schools, they can certainly take heart from this piece of good news.