Violetta Ayrapetova works on the locked unit at a residential facility in Chittenden County. She is a board-certified psychiatric mental health nurse. She plans to pursue wound care certification because many patients in psychiatric and substance use settings have untreated physical wounds. She does not want to be the provider who ignores them. Her path began well before nursing school. Her family came to Vermont as refugees in the early 1990s. They were Armenian minorities forced out of Azerbaijan during ethnic violence. Both parents held college degrees. Her father arrived with about $42. In Vermont, her mother cleaned houses, and her father worked as a prep cook. They bought a home and saved what they could. There was no financial cushion, no family money to fall back on, no inheritance. Years later, Violetta was back at the starting line. She had spent nearly a decade raising her children and was out of the workforce. When she tried to return, employers saw the gap and did not hire her. Her ex-husband had kept working and advancing. She had not. She called it the gender tax. School was the way through. She took classes at a community college, then applied to the nursing program at Vermont Technical College. Thirty spots. Three hundred applicants. She was waitlisted, waited, and finally got the call that a spot had opened. She took it. Nursing school in your forties, as a single parent with a mortgage, is as much a financial challenge as an academic one. The Curtis Fund scholarship covered a large share of her costs for both her associate’s and bachelor’s degrees at what is now Vermont State University. She graduated with honors in 2020 and went straight into the bachelor’s program, finishing cum laude. The scholarship did not erase her debt, but it kept it manageable and kept her enrolled when quitting would have been easier. She now holds a board certification in psychiatric mental health nursing and is pursuing wound care next. The patients she encounters in psychiatric and substance use settings often have skin wounds that go unaddressed because of the stigma attached to how they got there. Violetta doesn’t want to be a provider who looks away. “There’s such a great need for psychiatric nurse practitioners,” she says, “and so few go into that field because it’s hard and it feels overwhelming. But that’s what I want to tackle.” After her wound care, she is considering pursuing a doctorate and possibly opening her own practice. Her mother cleaned houses. Her father prepped food. Now her daughter has received the same Curtis Fund scholarship and is heading to McGill. “Education really touches an entire community,” Violetta says. “Not just me.”  The Curtis Fund has always been about more than paying tuition. It is about opening doors that can change the course of a life—and sometimes a family. Violetta’s story is a powerful reminder that when we invest in one Vermonter’s education, the impact can reach far beyond a single scholarship. To read more stories about Curtis Fund scholars, visit: https://www.thecurtisfund.org/meet-the-scholars  Learn more about how to support Vermont students like Violetta: https://www.thecurtisfund.org/donate#give-now  Read the story on VTDigger here: From shut out to starting over. ...read more read less