By Jennifer Eisenbart
Editor
Almost three decades worth of giving back to an education program that helped thousands has reached its sunset.
The end of the 2015-16 school year will mark the official end of the Chris Roanhouse Award, given each year to a special education student for post high school education.
The final $500 award was made in 2015, and in February, Bill and Norma Roanhouse – who established the fund after their son, Chris, was killed in a car accident in 1987 – donated the base of the foundation, $10,000, to Burlington’s special education program.
Chris Roanhouse was a standout football player at Burlington High School who also benefitted from the district’s special education programs.
“We had to find ways to work around,” his mother, Norma explained. “He got so much out of the LD (learning disabled) program in the public schools.”
After Chris’s death, a number of different people – including Tom Kendall, the father of Chris’s best friend, and special education teacher Kent Zahn – helped set up the award program.
“It was our way of giving them a little bit of a boost,” Zahn said of the award, adding that students used the money for everything from college to tech school to apprenticeship programs.
“Anything that would enhance their post high school education,” Zahn said.
Over the years, donations continued to be made to the program, with Zahn, Kendall and Marv Daniel helping administer the funds. The interest from the account was used to fund the award, given each spring at BHS’s senior awards ceremony.
A plaque in the lobby at BHS lists all of the recipients over the years.
According to Bill and Norma Roanhouse it was time to bring the award to a close.
“I think it had run its course,” Norma said. “It had gotten to be too much.”
The remaining money will be administered to the district’s special education program, according to the Roanhouses, though the district office.
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