Palmetto High student honored as U.S. Presidential Scholar. She’s shooting for the stars

A Parrish teen with out-of-this-world goals has received one of the highest educational recognitions in the country.

Lilyanne K. Pepe, a senior at Palmetto High School, with a passion for space and engineering, was honored as a 2019 Presidential Scholar in career and technical education.

“To me, it means that not only have I accomplished so much but so has the community,” Pepe said. “(The award) is not just mine, it’s everyone’s that’s had a role in this community.”

Pepe is one of 161 high school seniors from across the country recognized by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Students are chosen based on their academic success, artistic and technical excellence, essays, school evaluations, transcripts, leadership and community service.

This year, seven students from Florida were recognized, including Pepe.

“It feels really good to be recognized but also there are so many other kids out there that definitely deserve the award,” Pepe said.

U.S. Presidential Scholars are comprised of one young man and one young woman from each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and U.S. families living abroad, as well as 15 chosen at-large, 20 Scholars in the Arts and 20 Scholars in Career and Technical Education.

Pepe took International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme classes in middle school and in high school started working toward her Cambridge AICE diploma while also taking Advanced Placement and honors classes.

“Probably the hardest challenge in school was figuring out the best way to study. Once I started taking Cambridge AICE classes I had to restructure the way I was studying,” Pepe said.

Counselors, teachers and instructors challenged her to work to her full potential by encouraging her to take more difficult classes and go outside of her comfort zone, she said. Pepe said she is grateful for their support, as well as that of her family.

“She is capable of doing anything she puts her mind to. If her goal is to get to the moon, she will get to the moon,” said Jenna Bell, a counselor at Palmetto High School.

Bell has known Pepe for years, and served as Pepe’s counselor in middle school. Pepe, she said, is a gifted, smart, driven and ambitious student who is humble about her many accomplishments.

But those accomplishments are likely to only continue to stack up. Pepe said she’s looking forward to pursuing the new opportunities — such as rocketry club — she’ll find while attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach on a full-ride Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) scholarship.

Pepe’s desire to be an engineer and love of astronomy will merge as she plans to study astronautical engineering with hopes of someday working with rockets satellites and space stations.

“I’ve had a passion for that as long as I can remember so I’m excited about that because now I get to pursue it,” Pepe said. “Just knowing that’s going to be my end goal, just putting everything I have into everything I do every day I’m working.”

Her love of space started at a young age. Pepe’s grandfather, an astronomer in New York, took her outside as a toddler to look at the stars. Eventually she started going in to work with him, seeing the labs and design projects his students were creating.

A battalion commander in Palmetto High School’s JROTC and founder of the school’s Technology Student Association chapter, she also attended a summer seminar program at the U.S. Air Force Academy last summer and twice attended a Women in Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology summer leadership program.

Pepe was also recognized as an honorable mention in the 2019 Golden Herald Awards for citizenship. She established a local “Thanks across the Generations” program to recognize military veterans, continues to volunteer with Easter Seals, tutors students at Palmetto High School and participates in her church youth group and Girl Scouts.

On top of her academic and community service achievements, she has also participated in Manatee County Youth and Palmetto High Varsity rowing, track and cross country running.

“It’s just everything you want to see in every student. It’s the whole reason we got into education,” Bell said.