John's Scholarship Fund Update

One of the purposes of this blog is to keep John's family and friends up to date with respect to the status of the scholarship fund established in his memory. This fund has become a truly fitting tribute to John. To date, almost $51,000.00 has been contributed and donations still periodically arrive, especially during the season of holiday giving. We anticipate considerably more will be available once the affairs of John's estate are settled.

To remind everyone, the original objective of the fund was to, as John's brother says, help the "big geek" foster a lot of "little geeks" who share John's love of information technology. To that end, we have identified an exciting opportunity to continue John's legacy. It involves the elementary school that John attended from the 2nd through 7th grade, Mother Catherine Spalding School in Helen, MD. John started there when we first moved to Maryland in 1983 and went there until we moved to Belgium in 1989 and as such, it had a big impact upon John's formative years. In addition, John is buried in the cemetery directly behind the school, which provides yet another connection.

We have had preliminary discussions with school and archdiocesan officials and have focused at this point in time on potentially equipping the middle school grades of Mother Catherine with enough laptop computers that each student will have one to use in class. The objective would be to have the use of the internet and various software applications directly incorporated into lesson plans across the board. This would allow students and teachers to directly incorporate the use of information technology into all course work rather than being limited to a computer lab that can be accessed only periodically during the week.

We want to make certain that this makes the most sense for the students and faculty before any hard commitments are made at this point in time. Nonetheless, we also want to make certain that all of John's family and friends are aware of the latest developments in this area.

For those interested, contributions can still be made to:

John William Leonard Memorial Scholarship Fund
c/o Bank of America
28250 Three Notch RD
Mechanicsville, MD 20659

UPDATE: A tax-deductible charitable scholarship fund in John's memory has been established at Mother Catherine Spalding School. For those interested, tax-deductible contributions can be made to:

MCSS for J.W. Leonard Technology Scholarship

and can be mailed to:

Mother Catherine Spalding School
Helen, MD 20635

Thanks to all for your continuing generosity and for helping the "Big Geek foster a lot of little geeks."