Want to help raise money for Pike County students to get scholarships?

“All you have to do is eat,” said Mark Head, president of the education committee of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce.

The committee gives out its P.R.A.I.S.E. scholarships each year to the students from each local school that achieve the highest ACT score at each of their respective schools.

“It’s important for the community to have a good education system going in the various facets that we have,” Head said. “We want to promote that and do what we can as a community to strengthen the educational systems that are here in our community.”

So the Chamber created the P.R.A.I.S.E. Scholarships as well as the Betty Wagoner and Dr. Hank Jones scholarships.

Through the P.R.A.I.S.E. Scholarships, the student with the top ACT score at each of the local high schools receives $500. The student who scores the highest overall in the county also gets a $1,000 scholarship. The Hank Jones scholarship goes to a select student involved in the academy system among the schools and the Betty Wagoner scholarship also goes to a s senior selected through an application process.

“College is expensive,” Head said. “We want to remove as many barriers as we can toward them being successful and hopefully they turn around and put it back into the community.”

There is only one fundraiser for the scholarship program: “Let’s Eat.”

“Let’s Eat keeps us from going out and soliciting donations,” head said. “We partner with a local restaurant and, in exchange for advertising and running social media, the restaurant agrees to contribute 10 percent of their income that day to go to the scholarship … That’s the only fundraiser for the scholarship certainly thankful that we have restaurants willing to do that.”

Today is one of those days, with Julia’s restaurant hosting the program. Head encourages anyone that can come out and eat there today to drop by and help the program.

“All you have to do is show up and eat and you’ll be helping out,” Head said. “We try to do it at least once a month. We’d love to expand the scholarships whether that means increasing the amount we give out or possibly giving out more scholarships. It would certainly be a good thing if we can get more people out to do that and support the kids.”