Montana Education/Business Partnerships

The scholarship drive aims to raise $20,000 this year, and Booker said it already has $8,000 from various donors, including other event partners.

"This federal grant money will help make sure that folks in central Montana can become qualified for these good-paying jobs," Gov. Steve Bullock

During the four-month courses, students will help manage special consulting projects requested by area businesses and non-profit organizations.

The kits are designed to help local merchants welcome MSU students and their families to Bozeman and celebrate the start of the school year.

"At CenturyLink we like to reward teachers for finding innovative ways of using technology in their classrooms and Jim Weber and Tom Kain are perfect candidates for this kind of financial assistance."

"It’s a little bit of a recruiting tool," said Mary Heller, director of Career Services at MSU-Northern. "It gives us a chance to get high school students interested in the diesel mechanics program, the automotive technology program and the agricultural technology programs. We get a chance to talk to them and explain the educational opportunities that are here. But our industry partners that come to this event do eventually hire our students. These students can see that these are real people who, someday when they want a job, come to our campus and hire."

"At a cultural level, if we are not inspiring our students and inculcating a culture of excellence and helping to give students opportunities to be innovative," Philp said, "we are failing as a community."

The Graduation Matters Stevensville program received $8,000, and high school principal Brian Gum said the school has set a goal of reducing the dropout rate to 2 percent and reducing the number of students who are credit-deficient to 10 students.

"My idea of coaching is to meet students where they are and take them where they want to go. Encourage them to do things they might not do on their own to reach a goal quicker and more efficiently."

"Montana is blessed with such caring and hard working students."