Decades after death, teacher still aids students
MILWAUKEE — Richard Franz remembers exactly how it played out, that night when his daughter crashed.
He and his wife got the phone call at 11 o’clock. Their daughter Emily, a teacher in the little town of Shullsburg, had been in an accident. She was taken to the local hospital, which wasn’t equipped to treat her, and then to a different hospital. By that time, it was too late.
She died the next day, Oct. 13, 1973. She was 24 years old.
Her father is 101 now, and has outlived both his children and his wife, Maxine. But he has been able to see Emily's memory remain alive in ways no one could initially have imagined.
Franz had $3,000 to her name when she died. In the summer of 1974, her parents went to the superintendent of the Shullsburg School District to propose the idea of a scholarship fund for Shullsburg High School graduating seniors.
Six years after that, the fund’s first scholarships were given out — $800 each to two students in the Shullsburg High School Class of 1980. It was the same class Emily Franz had taught as a sixth-grade teacher in the year before her death.
Today, the Emily Franz Scholarship Fund is worth $1.8 million, and has helped 327 Shullsburg High School students pay for post-secondary education over the past 36 years.
Money for continuing a student's education is cherished in Shullsburg, which has just a shade over 1,200 residents in Lafayette County in the southwestern part of the state. Its median family income in 2013 was roughly $40,000, about $11,000 less than the national median family income that year. Half its students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, school district Superintendent Loras Kruser said.
This year, 10 Shullsburg High School students received $5,500 each in scholarships to be used within the first two years of college or a two-year vocational or associate’s degree program.
Joseph Lyne is one of the 10 students receiving a scholarship. This fall, he will attend Iowa State University, majoring in agricultural and life sciences education. He hopes to be a high school agricultural teacher and eventually go on to earn his master’s in education to become a principal.
Tuition, room, board, and books for his first year at Iowa State University will cost around $31,000. The scholarship is a big help.
“It’s a pretty big honor to receive the Emily Franz,” he said.
Through the years, Richard Franz has met many of the scholarship’s recipients. He has two large red volumes of letters from grateful students.
Emily Franz, had she lived, would have been 66 this month. Through the scholarship fund, her father said, her life continues to have meaning and impact.
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