Among them were the 11 winners of the 2026 Berks\u2019 Best Awards<\/a>. Those present and the categories they won were William Ferenchick of Wilson, math; Lillian Hoffa of Twin Valley, visual arts; Sloane Wolfe of Twin Valley, communications; Elise \u201cNox\u201d Clemmens of Gov. Mifflin, social studies; SethToal of Gov. Mifflin, business; Alan \u201cRocky\u201d Rochlin of Gov. Mifflin, performing arts; Amalia Cannon of Wilson, world languages; Finnegan Miller of Conrad Weiser, science\/environment and Colin Brown of Oley Valley, career and technical education.<\/p>\n The Berks\u2019 Best awards are funded by the Hawley and Myrtle Quier Fund<\/a> and Arrow International Scholarship Fund<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Berks County Community Foundation.<\/p>\n Philip Cavalier, who holds a doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is the 13th president of Kutztown University,<\/a> was the keynote speaker. He was hired in 2025 and officially installed last month<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cBe present, be present wherever you are,\u201d Cavalier said. \u201cBe open to new experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n He related a story about a student he has written letters of recommendation for numerous times.<\/p>\n He said Jessica Smith had grown up in a rural southern environment much like \u201cThe Andy Griffith Show\u201d home town and noted how the students there probably didn\u2019t know who Andy Griffith was, which elicited chuckles from the adults in the audience.<\/p>\n She had never flown before and took a trip Cavalier was chaperoning to New Orleans.<\/p>\n \u201cI still bear the scars from the death grip she had on my arm,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n During her college years Smith changed her major three times, Cavalier said, but finally found what she was destined to do.<\/p>\n He also advised the students to take advantage of the opportunity to study abroad and that if finances were a barrier to that, he would help them find a way to make it happen.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can find out a lot about yourself,\u201d Cavalier said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note: this story was updated May 21, 2026 at 1 p.m. to correct the number of scholarship…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,85079,227,182,139,28,128,130,129,706],"class_list":["post-199210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-berks-best-2026","tag-education","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Dr.](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/REG-L-BCCFLuncheonCavalier.jpg\")
Dr. Philip Cavalier, who holds a doctorate in English and is president of Kutztown University, was the keynote speaker Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at the Berks County Community Foundation Scholarship Luncheon. It was held at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Reading. (Susan E. Miers Smith\/Reading Eagle)<\/p>\n