Follow Dr. Gestson’s Career

Following his tenure as principal at Camelback High School, Dr. Chad Gestson was hired by the Phoenix HS District as the new Director of School Leadership for the District, where he supervised school principals and developed and trained future school leaders. He subsequently became the Superintendent of the District in which role he instituted many positive programs. He recently retired from that role and currently works as the head of an education think tank sponsored by Northern Arizona University.

Used the student dinners as a recruiting tool

During the early years of the Camelback project, Rick West, SVPAZ members and friends hosted small, intimate monthly dinners at which the Camelback HS principal invited and brought with him six high school students, a different six for each dinner. Each dinner host invited five adults from the local community who have had interesting life stories. At each dinner all the participants are asked to share about their lives.

The results were remarkable in many different ways including:

• creating bonds between the students who may not have even known each other before the dinner,
• inspiring the students with a rags to riches story by one of the adults, a story to which one or more of the students could relate personally,
• inspiring the adults to understand the remarkable success of the student(s), especially in light of their many times difficult family and economic circumstances, and
• generating new ideas for improving the programs at the high school.

Donor Solicitation

Donations for gap scholarships were solicited and made via the donations section of this website. These donations go directly to the Camelback High School Scholarship Fund at the Arizona Community Foundation and are tax deductible.

Since these donations are going directly to the Arizona Community Foundation, there are no overhead or other costs deducted from them other than the slight fee charged by ACF to handle all the aspects of accounting for the contributions, sending the donors letters confirming their tax deduction, sending the money to the students or their colleges, and providing the entire on line infrastructure for the vetting process as we selected the gap scholarship recipients, etc.

Read the story of Dr. Quintin Boyce