NATCHEZ — Dasani Craft, the 2018 Natchez High School salutatorian, recently received the 2018 Walter S. Bounds Scholarship for Excellence in the amount of $1,000 from the Mississippi Association of School Superintendents.

The award came as a surprise, Craft said, the day of the July 16 Natchez-Adams School Board meeting.

Dasani was one of seven chosen from a pool of 106 applicants statewide to receive the scholarship, making this the second consecutive year a NHS student has been honored with the MASS award. 

“I honestly don’t even remember applying for it,” Craft said. “It was unexpected, but I was really excited.”

Craft said her mother, Dawn, went to NHS on July 16 to register Craft’s younger sister Kristen for school — completely unaware that district board members were in the process of reaching out to Craft to tell her the good news.

“The secretary was on the phone with Mr. (Tony) Fields and said, ‘Oh there’s her mother right now,” Craft said. “They were trying to call either my mom or me to tell us they were presenting the award that afternoon.”

Craft said she loves spending her spare time with her family. She said her mother and her fiancé, Dylan O’Connor, encouraged her to keep her grades up and to do her best in school.

She graduated as the class salutatorian, and during her time at Natchez High she played the flute in the NHS band.

Craft said she is registered to start pre-nursing school at Alcorn State University in Natchez on Aug. 20 and plans to later attend nursing school at Alcorn to become a registered nurse practitioner.

“(Nursing) is something I’ve always wanted to do since I was little,” Craft said. “I like helping people. My mom and both of her sisters are (certified nursing assistants), so it kind of runs in the family.”