Students step up to help kids

Dennis David and Aaron Holt have at least one thing in common: they are committed to helping kids.

David is the founding director of Fallbrook Youth Scholarships and Holt is the Fallbrook Union High School football player who will lead the organization’s 2006-2007 scholarship fundraising effort that will benefit Pop Warner Little Scholars Football and Cheerleading. Each school year a Warrior football player whose lifestyle best exemplifies leadership and positive role modeling for kids is selected by the team’s head coach.

“It feels good to know that’s why I was chosen,” says Holt, who began his own football career in Pop Warner, then later coached football youth camps. He quarterbacked for the Warriors throughout the 2006-2007 season and will head to San Jose State in the fall for a career in kinesiology.

Over the summer, Holt will make appearances to promote Fallbrook Youth Scholarships, David says. Holt joins the ranks of previous FUHS Warrior honorees Andrew Atkins, Tyler Breckinridge, Danny Mortensen, Kyson Hawkins, Casey Sovacool and Gio Morales. His name will be engraved along with the others’ on a perpetual trophy on display at Fallbrook Union High School. Now in its seventh year, Fallbrook Youth Scholarships began in 2000.

It was Morales who became the catalyst for the organization, says Dennis David.

“I was involved with the Learning Center in 2000 and brought some third and fourth grade boys to watch football practice,” David said. “Morales came over to the group, knelt down and talked to the boys. He encouraged them to stay in school and go out for football. These kids never dreamed they could be football players, too. They were very excited.”

From this experience, David realized that kids coming from families who barely made ends meet didn’t have a chance to participate in Pop Warner without financial help. The $180 participation fee for each child in 2000, stiff then, has now increased to $240.

To raise money, David, his two daughters and Warrior team mothers Becky Clements and Kathleen Gillis formed Fallbrook Youth Scholarships and used Morales’ player number, 70, as a benchmark, asking the community to donate $70 or multiples of “70.” Although the player number changes – Mortensen, in 2003-2004, wore number 3 – the fundraising gets stronger each year.

Today, David says, the ratio of boys to girls applying for scholarship help is changing, too: “Last year, 40 percent of the applicants were girls who want to be cheerleaders.”

Now a group of Fallbrook High students have joined the Fallbrook Youth Scholarships team. In addition to Holt, as a way of satisfying their public service requirement, six students are teaming together to draft press releases, design a solicitation brochure, compile a mailing list, stuff envelopes and send “thank you” notes to community members who help make a kid’s dream of joining Pop Warner come true.

Susie Gonsalves, a Warrior Booster Club member who, with her husband, owns The Other Office, is providing support for the student volunteers, printing the fundraising materials and providing other office resources. Floribel Correa, a sophomore team member who is working on a press release, says she got involved because “I know a lot of kids who want to do something