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MCCTC senior gets scholarship from family of 2001 graduate who died
CANFIELD
Maria Haynes will start her college career with help from the family of another young woman who once had the same dream as her: to work in the criminal justice field.
Haynes, 17, of Canfield, and a student at the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center, was awarded the Leslie Marie Demetrios Memorial Scholarship Tuesday.
“My daughter passed away from a drug overdose. ... I wanted to keep her name going,” said Diane Demetrios of Boardman, who now runs Let’s Make a Difference, an organization dedicated to helping young people overcome some of the obstacles with which her daughter struggled.
Leslie died Oct. 20, 2013, at age 31.
“Leslie enjoyed music, especially The Beatles, watching television, especially The Kardashians, and enjoyed all animals, her favorite being her cat, Magic,” her family wrote in her obituary. “Leslie was close to her family, and had a great and special love for her niece and nephew, Delaney and Alex.”
Diane, who raises funds by selling candy bars at area businesses, gave a $500 scholarship in her daughter’s honor last year; this year the scholarship is for $1,000 thanks to a matching donation from the Mahoning Valley Hospital Foundation.
The scholarship is awarded to students graduating from MCCTC’s criminal justice/public safety program, from which Leslie graduated in 2001.
Haynes will continue her education at Youngstown State University, where she will major in criminal justice and psychology. Her dream, she says, is to become a psychologist or psychiatrist at a prison.
“It means a lot,” said Haynes, who was all smiles at the scholarship presentation she attended with her parents, Tammy Lindblad and Russell Haynes, both of Canfield.
“It shows that all the hard work at school paid off,” she said. “I’m very honored to have it.”
Hard work was a key factor in the decision to give Haynes the scholarship.
“It’s her character. It’s her work ethic. And she never gave up,” said Jerry Thompson, public safety instructor at MCCTC.
“She initially was a little apprehensive, but she stuck with it and came out on top. I see her doing something great in the public safety field,” said Thompson, who has 16 seniors in his program this year.
In addition to the scholarship fund, Diane does other work in her daughter’s honor through Let’s Make a Difference, which is under the umbrella of Making Kids Count. The organizations gave books to Boardman elementary students last fall after Diane visited the schools and shared an anti-bullying message.
“[Leslie] was bullied as a child, and had very low self-esteem,” Diane said at the time.
“I want to turn it around,” she said then, saying she believes her daughter would have made better choices had she not been bullied.
“Sometimes you have to turn something bad, and something that shouldn’t have happened, into something good,” she said Tuesday.