PORTLAND, Ore. (PORTLAND TRIBUNE) — ACCESS Academy eighth-grader Soren Cowell-Shah is the first student in Portland Public Schools history to be selected as a Caroline D. Bradley Scholar. The scholarship comes with a full ride to any high school of his choice.
That’s right, a full ride to high school — not college.
“It lets me go to any high school I want in the United States, paying tuition, which is honestly a great opportunity,” Cowell-Shah said. The 13-year-old hasn’t yet decided if he will pick one close to home or farther afield. The scholarship, administered by the Institute for Educational Advancement in California, comes with guidance in selecting a school based on each scholar’s aptitudes and goals.
“We’re very excited,” said proud mom Kinnari Shah in her Northeast Portland home. Her son was the only Oregonian out of this year’s 30 nationwide winners.
After a rigorous application process, including an in-person interview as a finalist, Cowell-Shah was selected for his exceptional academic achievement, high maturity level, demonstrated leadership and other qualities.
Cowell-Shah takes advanced courses at ACCESS Academy — a public K-8 school for highly gifted PPS students who have demonstrated they weren’t being well-served by their neighborhood school.
“We’ve just been so grateful that ACCESS provided such a good grounding and acceleration at his level — and still have friends, and a normal kid life,” Shah said.
After she heard accessing advanced courses can be difficult for young students at the high school level in the district, Shah said she began to wonder about other high school options.
For a student who will be ready for calculus next year in ninth grade — typically a 12th-grade or even college-level course — Shah worried: “How quickly will he run out of math (classes)?”
So, they started exploring options.
“We were not going to do private school; we couldn’t afford that. Let’s see what else we can do,” she described as the family’s thinking at the time.
The application process for the Bradley scholarship is extensive. Shah said that, at times, the unlikelihood of getting the award — paired with the realities of day-to-day time constraints — made them question whether it was worth completing the application.
But then Cowell-Shah took the SAT test — earning 750 on the math section and 700 on the verbal portion.
Only in seventh grade at that time, his scores put him in the 98th percentile of the nation’s high school juniors.
“His SAT scores came back, and we were like: ‘Oh. We should apply,'” Shah said.
The California-based Bradley scholarship appears to be the only one in the country that provides merit-based tuition funding that isn’t tied to any particular high school. (The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, based in Virginia, also provides support for eighth-grade and high school students, but the funding is for supportive services, not tuition.)
The namesake of the Bradley scholarship “felt that there wasn’t a lot out there that recognized the intellect in the same ways as there was for athletics, the arts, etc.,” said Institute for Educational Advancement spokeswoman Nicole LaChance, “so she wanted to create a scholarship to recognize students for their academic merit. She especially felt that assisting students at the high school level was important, as this was a time in their lives that they needed the most support.”
Cowell-Shah said his interests lie in math, science, and computers, as well as theater and singing. A member of the Pacific Youth Choir since age 5, he has been in the children’s chorus of two Portland Opera productions and a couple of high school productions. The budding artist enjoys singing Broadway numbers and classical songs, as well as songs in different languages.
Cowell-Shah, who takes Spanish and is excited about a planned visit his mother’s homeland of India, said he is most interested in linguistics, and would like to have a career as a computational linguist — finding patterns across languages.
Shah said she is often asked how she got both her boys so academically advanced — Cowell-Shah’s 10-year-old brother also attends ACCESS Academy. But, she said, she doesn’t really feel it was up to her.
“We were just following his lead,” she said. “You follow what they’re interested in and you encourage that.”
In this manner, Cowell-Shah began reading at age 3 and continued to progress rapidly from there, she said.
“It just was clear that they saw things differently and made connections and found patterns,” Shah said.
Cowell-Shah said he aims to decide where he will attend high school in the next few months — a decision that’s gotten a lot more complicated and exciting since winning the scholarship.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity for kids like me who might not be able to get as good an education if there wasn’t such a thing,” he said.
Other Portland winners
In addition to Cowell-Shah, there have been four other Portland-area winners of the Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship since it began in 2002.
Jimmy Liu won in 2014 and currently attends Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Seth Talyansky, from the Portland Jewish Academy, won in 2014 and currently attends Catlin Gabel School in outer Southwest Portland.
Arjun Jain, from Beaverton School District’s Meadow Park Middle School, won in 2015 and currently attends Caitlin Gabel School.
Leila Hardy, from Lake Oswego Junior High School, won in 2017 and currently attends Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts.