Three Springs senior Grace Powell leads a busy life

Grace Powell, 17, once ran an egg business, with as many as 25 chickens. She earned $200 selling eggs to family friends.

“Most high school students don’t have their own business,” she said.

Powell is graduating from Three Springs High School in the Cheney School District, a nontraditional school that fits with her busy life outside of school.

Home-schooled through the ninth grade, she started at Three Springs so she would only have to attend once a week. The rest of the week is spent doing Running Start at Spokane Community College studying physics and microeconomics, attending The Enrichment Cooperative through Spokane Public Schools and spending more than 10 hours a week in activities and worship with her church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Cheney. She also spends three hours a week cleaning houses.

“She has a very strong sense of self,” said counselor Lisa Staub. “Her love is the Constitution. Discussions with Grace often revolve around what is right and wrong and how to tolerate differences among people.”

Her love for the Constitution started by reading two books with a group of home-schooled students and teens, “The Making of America,” and “The 5,000 Year Leap.” She feels that if the government followed the Constitution to the letter, the United States would be well beyond the rest of the world.

“It’s a miracle,” she said of the document. “It’s so hard to find a government that fits with human nature. All the parts have a purpose.”

It has inspired her to pursue degrees in either political science, the law or to become a teacher. She hopes to either attend Brigham Young University or Utah State, which she said has a very good law and Constitutional studies program.

When she turns 19, she plans on taking a year off of college to go on a mission.

Her faith is important to her, and she looks forward to getting married one day in the LDS Temple. She wants to have children, who she plans to home-school.

“Education is very important to me,” she said. “It makes me a better person. And it will still help me when I teach my children.”

She’s No. 4 in a family of 13 children. This summer, the family will travel to Alabama for a family reunion.

“We have a big bus,” she said of her family vehicle. On the way back, they plan to make stops in Utah and in Colorado, where one of her brothers is on his own mission.