North Hills Christian School senior Dana Salmon has been selected as one of 800 winners nationally in the 2013 National Achievement Scholarship Program competition.
The program recognized Salmon as one of the most academically promising African-American students in the nation.
Ebonee Collins, of A.L. Brown High School in Kannapolis, also was named as a winner by the National Achievement Scholarship Program, which rewards scholastically talented black American young men and women.
Salmon and Collins were initially selected from among 160,000 participants in 2011, when they took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. In September 2012, they were designated as semifinalists, which narrowed the field to 1,600 African-American high school seniors.
They were then selected as one of 1,300 finalists before being named a winner.
Salmon will attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was also accepted at Indiana Wesleyan University, Liberty University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. At UNCG, Salmon was offered admittance into the Lloyd International Honors College.
As a junior at North Hills, Salmon was selected to attend Tar Heel Girls’ State. She is the head prefect for the North Hills High School student government program and a member of the National Honor Society and Junior Civitan Club, a high school missions club and her church youth group. She plays bass for the North Hills Praise Band and her church.
Salmon enjoys spending her summers volunteering as an assistant at Waterworks Visual Arts Center, and she also works a part-time job. Through a program at North Hills, Salmon studied in Europe and went on a mission trip to Mexico.
Salmon is the daughter of Pauline Campbell. She entered North Hills in the sixth grade and will graduate this year.
“North Hills has had the greatest impact on my life spiritually,” Salmon said in a school press release. “It’s not just a Bible school with some academics thrown in. The academic program is very rigorous. My friends from NHCS who have already gone off to college say they were much better prepared than their peers – not just where academics were concerned, but also in adapting to the college environment.”