FORT LEE, Va. — Students should be finishing up their preparations to apply for one of the 500 available $2,000 Fisher House Foundation Scholarships for Military Children, as the deadline is approaching. Applications are being accepted through Feb. 15.
Last year, five students at Hill Air Force Base were among hundreds from military families across the Department of Defense to receive a $2,000 college scholarship.
The Scholarships for Military Children Program was created in 2001 to recognize the contributions of military families to the readiness of the fighting force, and to celebrate the role of the commissary in the military family community. The program is administered by Fisher House Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides assistance to service members and their families.
This year is the first in which the entire application process is online, said Jim Weiskopf, Fisher House vice president. “We are excited with the initial results from the online application process. We can track, in real time, the number of applications started and completed at each commissary. We are on target for another highly competitive selection year.”
Eligibility for the program is determined using the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System database. Applicants should ensure that they, as well as their sponsor, are enrolled in the DEERS database and have a current military dependent ID card. The applicant must also be planning to attend or already be attending an accredited college or university, full time, in the fall of 2019 or be enrolled in a program of studies designed to transfer directly into a four-year program.
Applicants who are awarded a full scholarship to attend a college or university or receive an appointment to one of the military academies or affiliated preparatory schools are not eligible to receive funds from this program. A full scholarship is usually defined as one that provides for payment of tuition, books, lab fees and other expenses.
Among requirements of the application process is providing a short essay. This year’s request is military lifestyle-related: “Please cite two examples of how being a child of a military service member has influenced your educational goals.”
All rules and requirements for the program, as well as links to frequently asked questions and the application are available at MilitaryScholar.org.
Fisher House also recently added a custom scholarship search engine to the site, tailored to military families, called “Scholarships for Service.” It’s free, easy to use, and available on mobile devices or computers at militaryscholar.org.
Students enter brief background information and educational goals and the search tool will identify military-affiliated scholarships they may be eligible for based on their input. Once the search is complete, students receive a list of scholarships with a summary of eligibility requirements, points of contact and links to the scholarship provider’s website. Students can elect to have a PDF file of the results immediately emailed to them for use in selecting which scholarships to apply for.
The Scholarships for Military Children program is managed by Scholarship Managers, a national, nonprofit organization. If students have questions about the scholarship program application, they should call Scholarship Managers at 856-616-9311 or email them to militaryscholar@scholarshipmanagers.com.
No government funds are used to support the Scholarships for Military Children Program. Commissary vendors, manufacturers, brokers, suppliers and the general public donate money to fund the program.
