The Franklin Key Award

Since its inception, the Benjamin Franklin Senior High School Alumni Association has presented the Key Award to the student in the graduating class who best exemplifies the spirit and broad-based excellence of Mr. Benjamin Franklin. It is the sole special award given at the commencement exercises. The recipient is chosen by the board members of the Alumni Association from nominees put forward by faculty or fellow members of the senior class. The honoree remains unknown until named by the president of the Alumni Association at graduation. In 2007, the Key Award began including a $1,000 stipend from the Alumni Association.

Attributes and accomplishments especially considered in choosing the recipient are scholastic achievement, civic responsibility, practical knowledge and application, leadership, school loyalty, and the mutual respect of and regard for classmates. A description of Benjamin Franklin written by the first Alumni Association president, Tom Wagner, is read before the yearly selection process.

Benjamin Franklin was probably the most accomplished American in the broadest range of endeavors. Any encyclopedia recount of his life notes that he achieved distinction as a printer, publisher, author, philosopher, inventor, scientist, diplomat, and statesman. Remarkably he achieved his great success and notoriety against very great odds. The tenth of seventeen children born to a Boston soap and candlemaker, Franklin ran away to Philadelphia at the age of 17. Though denied a formal education, he was a consummate student and learned extensively from master printers, and later from colleagues and from experiments of his own design. His practical inventions - the Franklin stove, bifocals, and the lightning rod, among others - demonstrate his great faculty of applying his learning to practical problems. He was imbued with a great sense of civic responsibility and was instrumental in organizing many public services, including a library, volunteer fire department, paid duty watch patrol, the Academy of Philadelphia (which later became the University of Pennsylvania), and an organized militia. His American identity and commitment enabled him at the age of 70 to sign and promote the Declaration of Independence, to serve as America's envoy to France in the successful pursuit of military and financial support and, at 81, to champion the adoption of a strong, national instrument, the Constitution.

Past Key Award Recipients:

Revised 9/11/2009