Donor creates first scholarship for RN to BSN students
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In Luella Schraffenberger’s accomplished, 50-year career as a registered nurse, her one regret was that she never got her bachelor’s degree.
Her daughter, Lou Ann, has now endowed a scholarship in her mother’s name for UIC College of Nursing students in the online RN to BSN program: the UIC Luella K. Schraffenberger, RN, Memorial Scholarship.
“If that [program] was around when Mom was around, she would’ve been the first to sign up,” Lou Ann Schraffenberger says. “I wanted Mom’s legacy to be remembered, and she was such a believer in education. The idea of a scholarship in the RN to BSN program with her name attached was perfect.”
Luella Schraffenberger died in 2003, before the RN to BSN program existed in its current online format. It’s the first scholarship at UIC Nursing that specifically prioritizes RN to BSN students, which allows people who became nurses with an associate degree or diploma to continue working while simultaneously earning their bachelor’s degrees online.
“[To get a bachelor’s degree] Mom would’ve had to quit work and go back to school,” Lou Ann Schraffenberger says. “Dad died when I was in high school, so it was just me and Mom, trying to make it.”
Luella Schraffenberger spent 43 years working at South Shore Hospital, a community hospital in southeast Chicago, holding leadership positions, such as operating room supervisor, assistant director of nurses and director of nurses.
She was born on a family farm in eastern Iowa in 1914. After high school graduation, she moved to Chicago, where her uncle lived, and enrolled in South Shore Hospital’s three-year, nursing diploma program.
Education was important to Schraffenberger. She moved to Texas and earned a postgraduate certificate in nursing administration at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas while working as an operating room supervisor.
While visiting Chicago in 1943, Schraffenberger was hired as operating room supervisor at South Shore Hospital, a temporary position while the full-time supervisor took a six-month leave of absence. The nurse never returned and Schraffenberger stayed on. Forty-three years later, she retired as director of nurses.
Schraffenberger mentored nurses to be supervisors. To prepare them for leadership positions, she wanted them to understand “the total picture of health care,” her daughter says. She believed a bachelor’s degree was an important step in that progression.
“If a nurse was a diploma school or associate degree graduate, Mom encouraged them to earn a bachelor’s degree,” Lou Ann Schraffenberger says. “She thought – and told anyone who stood long enough to listen – that nurses ran the hospital. If some other people don’t show up for work, you might not notice, but if the nurses didn’t show up, you’d notice.”
Lou Ann Schraffenberger says her mother’s passion for higher education extended to her daughter. When Lou Ann wanted to get her associate’s degree in medical records administration, her mother wouldn’t let her, insisting she enroll in a bachelor’s program. Lou Ann got her bachelor’s degree from UIC (then known as the University of Illinois at the Medical Center).
Schraffenberger was proud of her daughter’s degree, and she was loyal to UIC for another reason, too. In 1978, she had cancer treatment for metastatic melanoma at the University of Illinois Hospital (now UI Health). She lived another 25 years.
“She loved UIC,” Lou Ann Shraffenberger says. “First, it got me a degree. Second, it saved her life.”
Lou Ann Schraffenberger says it occurred to her to endow the scholarship after she and five other classmates from the class of 1974 (from the UIC College of Applied Sciences) endowed a scholarship for health information management students . She realized endowing a scholarship was within financial reach.
“I never knew about funding a scholarship [before that],” she says. “I had the idea over the last couple years, ‘maybe there’s something I can do for Mom.’”