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Seniors honored for academic work

By Shawn Linenberger - | May 15, 2002

The 2002 Lawrence Journal-World Academic All-Star team includes a member from Tonganoxie High School and another from McLouth.

Bryan Gurss, a senior at THS, was one of 10 area seniors picked for the honor, while McLouth’s Katrina Cook also made the list.

Students from Lawrence High, Free State, Wellsville and Ottawa rounded out the team.

Tonganoxie’s Nancy Milleret was on the runners-up list.

Gurss scored a 30 on his ACT and is a 4.0 student. He’s ran cross country and track, along with basketball and now golf this spring. The THS senior had offers from smaller schools to play basketball, but Gurss opted for just academics at the place he’s attended football and basketball games at since he was 1 the University of Kansas.

A strong student in mathematics, Gurss will major in engineering at KU. Along with academic and athletic accomplishments, Gurss has also been involved in volunteerism, from coaching youth league sports and working with a highway cleanup project to helping at a soup kitchen and working on a recycling project.

McLouth’s Katrina Cook has a foot in the door for college. The All-Star team pick will already have 18 hours of college credit accumulated when she starts classes at KU in August. Cook will also enter the engineering field, with an emphasis on chemical engineering. The McLouth senior has a 4.0 GPA and she scored a 31 on the ACT. Her strong academics have helped her achieve a Watkins-Berger Scholarship from the chemical engineering department.

Volunteer work has also been Cook’s forte, as she’s found time to volunteer for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the Douglas County AIDS Project, along with local blood drives.

A panel of three judges chose the team. Angela Lumpkin, dean of the KU School of Education, Earl Kirk, associate dean of arts and sciences at Baker University in Baldwin, and Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett, interim dean of KU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, were this year’s judges.