Scholarship keeps school’s memory alive

SANGERVILLE – The school no longer exists and its youngest graduates are now in their 70s, but the memory of their alma mater is being preserved.

Since the mid-1970s, Sangerville High School alumni have provided a scholarship each year to a graduating senior from Sangerville, an effort that the alumni hope will continue in perpetuity.

“Sangerville kids will remember and that’s the important thing,” Bob Ronco of Corinth, who moved to create the scholarship fund about 30 years ago, said Sunday.

Ronco, a member of the 1946 graduating class, said he was so thankful for the education he received at the Sangerville school. “Sangerville High School opened a lot of doors,” Ronco said. It allowed him to attend the University of Maine and later to become a superintendent of schools.

“After I retired, I counted my blessings and one of them was attending a free high school,” Ronco said. He said wealthy people during those early years attended private academies that existed throughout the state while others attended small community schools. “I grew up in the ’30s during the Depression, and yet townspeople were willing to sacrifice their hard-earned dollars on our high school and this was a gift for many of us.”

He recalled that one of the last principals who worked at the school drew a salary of $900 a year.

“You can imagine what the teachers made,” he added.

Those sacrifices did not go unnoticed, according to Ronco. He said the alumni agreed to establish an endowment for a scholarship program as an effort to repay the community. The endowment now totals $40,000 and the interest from that money is used to award one and sometimes two scholarships each year, he said.

And those scholarships have “Sangerville High School written all over them,” Ronco said, a name that will never be forgotten.