A student from Richmond is among 571 high school seniors in the nation to be named semifinalists for the Cooke College Scholarship Program.
Leslie Cruz Urquilla, a Richmond resident and senior at KIPP San Francisco College Preparatory, is in the running for the scholarship that provides as much as $55,000 per year toward pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at any accredited undergraduate institution.
Leslie is set to attend Boston University in the fall, according to a spokesperson for the scholarship program. Although she has earned a full-tuition, merit-based, leadership scholarship, not all of her expenses will be covered. Earning the Cooke College Scholarship would allow her to graduate without debt. The 2025 Cooke College Scholarship recipients will be announced in late March.
Leslie is a first-generation Latina-American honor roll student who is fluent in Spanish. She also was inspired to become a San Francisco High School Elections Ambassador to help encourage youth civic engagement. She focused on voter registration outreach ahead of the November election and hosted a forum where San Francisco mayoral candidates could speak with constituents from the Bayview neighborhood. Her work with the Department of Elections was recognized by former San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who awarded her a Certificate of Honor.
The Virginia-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation sponsors the grant program and has awarded almost $304 million in scholarships to more than 3,400 students from 8th grade through graduate school since 2000. This year marks a milestone for the Cooke Foundation’s scholarship programs, as the organization is celebrating its 25th anniversary. This year’s semifinalists were selected through an even more rigorous academic standard with a new minimum unweighted GPA requirement of 3.75.
“We’re incredibly proud of how the Cooke Scholar community has evolved in 25 years of community-building,” said Natalie Rodriguez Jansorn, VP of Scholarship Programs at the Cooke Foundation. “Congratulations to these students for thinking big about their futures and earning the distinction of becoming a Cooke College Scholarship semifinalist.”