SLU 10880
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SCHOLARSHIP HONORS GRETNA RESIDENT, AIDS ORIENTATION LEADERS HAMMOND -- Tammy Rita Gettys of Violet, a junior majoring in nursing at Southeastern Louisiana University, is the first recipient of the university’s Joseph A. Soutullo Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship was established by Gloria Soutullo of Gretna and her eight children in memory of Joseph Soutullo, a long-time Gretna resident who died in 1995. The $500 per semester scholarship goes to the university’s “Orientation Leader of the Year.” Each year, approximately two dozen Southeastern students are chosen as Orientation Leaders, and work with the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid to conduct freshman orientation programs, and to serve as campus tour guides and student ambassadors at recruiting and other campus functions. Five of the Soutullo children graduated from Southeastern in the 1960s and 1970s and one son, Stephen Soutullo, has been a university employee since 1980. Now director of Academic Services, Soutullo coordinated the Freshman Orientation Program for many years as Southeastern’s director of Enrollment Services. Stephen Soutullo said his father, “knew how important the Orientation Program and the Orientation Leaders were to me and Southeastern. The qualities of creativity, commitment, and dedication, helping others, and leading by example that make a good orientation leader are the same qualities that made Joe Soutullo such an important person in the lives of everyone he touched.” Joe Soutullo often helped design and build sets and costumes for Southeastern Orientation Leaders to compete at the Southern Regional Orientation Workshop, and to write songs and skits for the competitions, his son said. “Orientation people were his kind of people, which is why my family decided that the perfect recipient for this scholarship would be the Orientation Leader of the Year,” Stephen Soutullo said. Gettys is the daughter of Edward and Patricia Gettys. She is a graduate of Chalmette High School and is active in the Student Government Association at Southeastern. Her twin sister, Danielle, is also an Orientation Leader. |