{"id":190570,"date":"2025-03-10T20:58:42","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T01:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/?p=190570"},"modified":"2025-03-10T20:58:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T01:58:43","slug":"essay-winners-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/2025\/03\/10\/essay-winners-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Essay winners&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"550\" height=\"486\" src=\"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Optimist-Essay-Winners-Pic-24-25.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-190571\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>The Optimist Club of Van Wert recently held its annual essay contest, with this year\u2019s theme being \u201cHow Optimism Has Paved My Road to Success.\u201d\u00a0 The Van Wert High School winners of the 2024-2025 Optimist Essay contest presented their essays and were honored at a\u00a0weekly club meeting.\u00a0Amanda (Mandy) Burenga won first place and was awarded $300; Catherine (Katie) Kramer, second-place winner received $200, and third-place winner Maria Parrish was awarded $100.\u00a0Burenga\u2019s essay was advanced to the district level for further judging for a chance at college scholarships through Optimist International. The Optimist Club gave special thanks to Bitsi Clark, Kylee Moody, and Paul Cearns for judging this year\u2019s essay entries.\u00a0 The Van Wert club, focusing on youth, consists of community leaders and area business representatives dedicated to improving the Van Wert area. <em>Photo submitted<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Optimist Club of Van Wert recently held its annual essay contest, with this year\u2019s theme being \u201cHow Optimism Has Paved My Road to Success.\u201d\u00a0 The Van Wert High School winners of the 2024-2025 Optimist Essay contest presented their essays and were honored at a\u00a0weekly club meeting.\u00a0Amanda (Mandy) Burenga won first place and was awarded [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-04 08:43:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190570"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":190572,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190570\/revisions\/190572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}