Mother’s Day was coming up, and Diane Levitt couldn’t think of a gift. Then, she says, “I got an email from Hunter College about the Mother’s Day Scholarship Program. I called my brother and sister and said, ‘This is amazing!’ And we were really very happy to do this.”
The result: the three siblings—Diane, Rabbi Joy Levitt, and Marc Levitt—honored their mother, Shirley Barer Levitt HCHS ’44, HC ’48, with a Mother’s Day Scholarship.
That scholarship is helping Hunter junior Jessica Gutierrez ’19 achieve her dream of a career in computer science. Jessica came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic as a young child speaking no English. She quickly mastered the language and discovered a talent for math and science. Encouraged by a community college professor, she learned to code and was accepted at Hunter.
No wonder Diane Levitt, senior director of K-12 education for Cornell Tech, describes her as “a really, really remarkable young woman.”And she’s the perfect recipient of a scholarship in Shirley Levitt’s name. “My mother was the first in the family to go to college,” says Diane Levitt. “This is a great way to honor her and an institution we have grown up believing in.”
