MEET LOGAN LOCKNER: Not your average teenager, this Daniel Boone High School senior has earned himself a full ride to college

In some ways, Logan Lockner is like any other high school senior. He works hard, gets good grades and still isn’t exactly sure what he wants to be when he grows up.
But talk with Lockner for five minutes and you’ll quickly learn this Daniel Boone High School student is hardly your average teenager.
“I’m really interested in the relationship between language and society — how documents become more than just nouns and verbs and adjectives,” Lockner said. “I’m interested in how they become a living, breathing social organism.”
That’s right. While other high school seniors are probably deciding who to take to prom or what they’re going to do this weekend, Lockner is contemplating the way words come to life.
As the coeditor of the high school’s yearbook, president of Beta Club and captain of the school’s academic team, Lockner has proven himself as a bit of an academic.
And it is Lockner’s academic intelligence that has earned him a full ride to Emory University in Atlanta, a scholarship valued at approximately $200,000. Based on merit, the Robert W. Woodruff Scholarship is named after the former president of Coca-Cola who donated much of his money to Emory University.
Lockner, whose grade point average is somewhere around a 3.9, plans to study English and political science at the university. He said he chose to attend Emory University because of its liberal arts program and all of the resources it has available for research.
“Going to a university like Emory, coming from a small, rural, publish high school is really unique,” Lockner said. “We have some wonderful people here at Boone that have been able to help me get to this point.”
Lockner credits two of his teachers at Boone for being most influential during his high school career — AP English teachers Deanna Carey and Sandra Fair.
“I am thankful to them for meeting me where I was at academically and challenging me to go beyond that,” Lockner said. “And this might sound corny, but for being my friends as much as they were my teachers.”
Carey said she really couldn’t do much to teach Lockner, who was already so “widely read” by the time he arrived in her class.
“All I did was sort of polish off a few points. He has read books that I’ve just read in the past five years — and he’s only in high school,” she said. “If I read he’s won the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize, I won’t be surprised. He sees the big picture.”
But Lockner is more than just an academic, Carey said.
“He’s not some ivory-tower type,” she explained. “He’s got friends in every social rung of the high school hierarchy. He relates on every level.”
When he’s not studying the ways of the world, Lockner enjoys reading contemporary literary fiction and calls himself a “huge classic film buff.” He is actively involved in student council at DBHS and the youth church group at Crossroads Church in Gray.
Lockner is the son of Diann and Kyle Lockner. He is the grandson of Dan and Mary Haley and Wayne and Joan Lockner.