No, every student in Pueblo is not getting a pot scholarship
A marijuana excise tax is providing $475,000 to high school seniors in Pueblo County. But there are some conditions.
It’s year two for the marijuana scholarship program in Pueblo County, and around $475,000 is up for grabs. But the large sum of money doesn’t mean every new high school graduate in the county gets a college scholarship.
The scholarship comes with some stipulations: those who are eligible for the scholarship have to be Pueblo County residents graduating from a Pueblo County high school and planning to attend either CSU-Pueblo or Pueblo Community College.
Some reports of the scholarship have hyperbolized the fund’s impact. One marijuana publication headline read, “In Pueblo: Scholarships for All, Thanks to Cannabis Taxes” while a Colorado Springs politics website posted on their Facebook, “It’s the first community in the world to provide a cannabis-funded scholarship to every graduating high school senior.”
Between Pueblo School District 60 and 70, there were 1,395 total high school graduates in the 2014–2015 school year, according to the Colorado Department of Education.
If there was no CSU-Pueblo/PCC requirement and the money was evenly divided between every high school graduate in Pueblo County, each student would get around $340.
Pueblo County Commissioners announced the total amount of money that could be awarded this year — which was expected when the scholarship was first announced last year — earlier this week. An anticipated $425,00 from cannabis excise tax revenue and another $49,664 from the Colorado Opportunity Scholarship Initiative fund the scholarships.
“Those state funds would not be available without a local match, which was made possible by the cannabis-funded scholarship program. Students can apply at the same time for both funds on the same application form,” a news release from Pueblo County said.
So far, it’s unclear how many recipients there will be. Last year, 23 recipients each got $1,000 from the fund, which is maintained by the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation. But now that a much larger sum of money is available, the number of recipients is expected to increase.
In past years, between 300 and 400 incoming college freshmen have graduated from local high schools and attended a local Pueblo college, according to Pueblo County officials.
Of the 4,535 enrolled students at CSU-Pueblo right now, 1,950 are from Pueblo County, according to the university fact book. Pueblo residents make up the largest part of CSU-Pueblo’s enrollment. At PCC, 3,036 students hail from Pueblo County, but no immediate numbers provided by PCC point to how many enrolled students graduated from Pueblo high schools.
The scholarship application deadline is April 30, 2017, and can be found here.
