A Service High School Senior won a National Honor Society award last week at a ceremony in Washington D.C. Natalie Hodge-Hannula was one of five students across the country chosen from over 16,000 applicants and will receive a $10,625 scholarship.
Hodge-Hannula endured a difficult upbringing before finding success in school and serving her community. Adults in her life suffered from alcoholism and addiction, and she said she didn’t learn to read until she was about 10 years old. She credits her teachers at Ocean View Elementary with helping her develop a love of learning.
“Just having one teacher, one person, really, believe in you, really set me up for success there,” Hodge-Hannula said.
Hodge-Hannula said her grandmother and older sister supported her as a child. She fondly remembers watching her sister graduate from Service High and making a promise to herself at that moment.
“I remember seeing their valedictorian, and I’m like, ‘that’s going to be me someday,’” Hodge-Hannula said. “I’m going to work as hard as I can to get that, get that spot and get that dream.”
Next month, Hodge-Hannula will graduate as the Service High Valedictorian for the class of 2025. She’s a straight-A student who has taken over a dozen Advanced Placement courses, and she spends much of her free time volunteering, when she’s not working at one of her four jobs.
Service Principal Imtiaz Azzam congratulated Hodge-Hannula.
“We are incredibly proud to celebrate Natalie’s outstanding achievement. Her hard work, dedication, and perseverance have truly paid off, and she continues to inspire those around her every day,” Azzam said in an email.
Hodge-Hannula serves as president of Service’s chapters of the National Honor Society and You Are Not Alone, a group that provides suicide prevention and mental health resources to students, and started her own nonprofit called Keys To The Future that offers life skill workshops to rural Alaskans. She also helped install a mural to raise awareness for the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline, and a self-help chalk wall in the halls at Service.
“It’s like two separate lives,” Hodge-Hannula said. “You have that home life where you’re kind of just struggling to make it to the next day, and then I get to school and I’m able to transition and kind of for six hours a day, forget about everything and just completely throw myself into the community here.”
Hodge-Hannula applied to various scholarships to pay for college, and has been awarded full-rides to each of the schools she’s applied to. She said she was surprised to hear her name called as the National Honor Society Character award winner last week.
“Really just stepping up on the stage I did cry a little bit, but it was more so just like realizing that I was enough, and, it was kind of just a great way to represent Service as well,” Hodge-Hannula said. “I was really honored to be able to bring that home for everyone.”
Hodge-Hannula will defer her award winnings from the National Honor Society until graduate school, where she plans to study neuroscience. She hopes to one day become a pediatric surgeon.
