Donor remembers daughter’s art with $500 scholarship

Beginning this semester, Andrew Panter will be funding the Megan Panter Scholarship every fall and spring semester in memory of his daughter who died in a car accident Dec. 5.

This scholarship allows the university to award $500 to one student from the art department during the spring semester and to one student from the theatre department during the fall semester every year.

Panter is a non-traditional student studying criminal justice at the College of Health Sciences and Human Services since 2011.

According to him, Megan had an artistic talent from a very early age. She would draw anything and everything starting in elementary.

Panter happily recants, “I will always remember her drawing of a bowl of fruit that still hangs in the hall of Jefferson Elementary School.”

Megan also took an interest in dance when she was only five years old and sports later on in life, but decided to focus on art as she got older.

Once she started attending Rider High School, she furthered her artistic interests by enrolling into Advanced Placement Art Class. This course allowed her the opportunity to create art pieces for her portfolio and to participate in high school exhibits.

She was also able to display some of her artwork at Midwestern during her junior and senior years of high school.

After Megan graduated from Rider in 2009 she also looked into attending the Art Institute of Dallas and working on her art portfolio.

The Megan Panter Scholarship will honor her love for the arts and it will assist other art and theatre students to pursue their major.

Laura Jefferson has been the theatre chair for more than 25 years and she remembers Megan displaying her art at the university.

According to Jefferson, the College of Fine Arts is one of the smallest colleges in reference to student population. However, the facility’s equipment maintenance causes it to be one of the most expensive colleges.

Jefferson also claims, “theatre students are taught theory in the classroom and it is put into practice during production, which is very expensive in order to provide a quality education.”

Art students also have high costs to pay because the supplies and equipment required to create art pieces in the studio become very expensive.

With the increase of tuition, this scholarship will help students with the expensive costs that come along with obtaining an art or theatre degree.

Panter funded the scholarship in Megan’s memory because he wanted to create a positive outcome after her death.

He also hopes to eventually help more students each semester by establishing a web site in which businesses and individuals can donate to. This will allow him to give more assistance to more students each semester because Panter says, “she would have wanted it this way.”