Melissa Harnage rose to the top during her years at Grace Christian School in Valrico. But she didn’t start off with the intention of earning the salutatorian honor.
“The hardest thing was developing my work ethic,” Harnage said. “When I started high school in ninth grade, I wasn’t a very serious student at all. … I knew I wasn’t trying for excellence.”
Although the third generation Plant City girl could pass her classes with ease, she was focused on her friends, like many teenagers are.
In 10th grade, she left Grace Christian for Seffner Christian Academy. It was here that she had a revelation before transferring back to Grace Christian.
“I promised I would bring back a stronger work ethic,” Harnage said.
So she got involved both academically and athletically.
She became a member of the National Honor Society and has received the President’s Academic Excellence Award. Last summer, she was accepted to the student humanities conference and lived on the Eckerd College campus.
Her pursuits in volleyball also paid off. She’s been playing since seventh grade and was named best defensive JV player in 2012. In the fall 2014, Harnage and the varsity volleyball team won the National Association of Christian Athletes Division 4 National Championship in Dayton, Tennessee.
Besides sports, Harnage also enjoys theater, community service and art. She volunteers as an assistant at the Bruton Memorial Library, assists teachers and staff with activities for intellectually disabled students at Willis Peters Exceptional Center in Dover, and is the assistant volleyball coach at the YMCA and Face Painters for God. In 2014, she won four awards for her graphic artwork at the Florida State Fair and the Florida Strawberry Festival.
And last summer, she spent two weeks on a LeaderTreks mission trip in the orphanage, La Providencia in Honduras. While there, not only did she head the sanitation team, help with construction projects and lead children in vacation Bible school activities in Spanish, but she also witnessed firsthand the poverty in a developing nation.
Seeing homes with dirt floors and villages without a clean water source made a profound effect on her goals for the future, and she will be studying international business and foreign languages on a Danforth Scholarship to Florida Southern, with the hope of bringing business and infrastructure to third world countries to make better lives.
Contact Amber Jurgensen at ajurgensen@plantcityobserver.com.
