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A few clouds from time to time. Low 79F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph.
Updated: June 5, 2025 @ 2:07 am
Kitori Thomas
Jordyn Powell
Kitori Thomas
Jordyn Powell
The Ruby Rutnik Scholarship Fund has announced that this year’s winners are St. John students Jordyn Powell and Kitori Thomas.
Powell graduated in May as the valedictorian of her class at the V.I. Montessori School and Peter Gruber International Academy, while Thomas is entering her senior year as a marketing major at the University of the Virgin Islands.
This fall Powell will enter Princeton University as an architecture major. In addition to achieving a stellar academic record, she has served as a Youth Church Leader at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, volunteered at the Humane Society on St. Thomas, and has worked as a busser at La Tapa Plage. Her parents are Julice and Melville Holder and Antonio Powell.
Thomas, who graduated from the Gifft Hill School on St. John, is now entering her final year at UVI, where her favorite class was international marketing. She is active in the Youth Group at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church on St. John and works nearly full-time at the Caravan Gallery. Her parents are Melchia Athanase and Kyle Thomas.
The scholarship fund awards $5,000 to qualified female students annually in honor of Ruby Rutnik, who died in a car accident in 1996.
“This year marks the 29th year without Ruby, and on April 9 she would have been 50 years old,” said her mother, Janet Cook-Rutnik. “This is hard for us to contemplate as our forever-young girl was a 21-year-old senior at American University at the time of her death.”
In 1997, an annual softball tournament was organized for female high school students throughout the Virgin Islands as a way to fund the scholarship.
In 2014, the Rutnik family decided to end the tournaments and use the funds already raised to establish an endowment through the Gifft Hill School on St. John. This arrangement was especially appropriate as Ruby was one of the original preschool students when the school was founded as the Pine Peace School in 1978.
The goal of the scholarship is to ease the burden of paying for higher education, especially for those attending colleges and universities off-island. Since its inception, the fund has awarded more than $200,000 to over three dozen recipients.
Those wishing to contribute to the scholarship fund are asked to make their checks payable to Gifft Hill School, noting RRSF on the bottom of the check, and send by mail to GHS, 5000 Estate Enighed No. 356, St. John, V.I. 00830.
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