Trustees of the Annie L. Sears Scholarship records

The Trustees of the Annie L. Sears Scholarship maintain a financial bequest of Annie Lyman Sears, and use it to award college scholarships to young women graduates of Waltham High School. The first scholarship was awarded in 1936 to Mia Reinap. As of 2017, the bequest has assisted over 100 women in their pursuit of higher education.

Annie Lyman Sears was born March 10, 1862 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Philip Howes and Sarah Pratt (Lyman) Sears. She attended private schools in Boston and lived on Beacon Hill, spending her summers in Waltham. In 1899 she became interested in the vacation-school movement and, in 1908, founded and supervised the Bright Vacation School, a vacation school for girls in Waltham. Sears was also instrumental in the establishment of Waltham's first public kindergarten and in the city's playground movement. She wrote several books, including "A Drama of Spiritual Life, A Study of Religious Experience," and graduated with an Associate of Arts degree from Radcliffe College in 1920. Sears died in Boston on February 9, 1932.

In Clause 9 of her will, dated September 11, 1930, Annie L. Sears wrote "I give to Susan C. Lyman Wearn, of Weston, Massachusetts, and Elizabeth H. Wood, Leslie Eaton, Louise Fay and Emily L. Storer, all of Waltham, and their successors, the sum of eighteen thousand dollars in trust, to invest and reinvest the same and to use the income thereof for the education of worthy girls and young women, residents of Waltham, and the development of their personality, by training literature, dramatics and music, or in other ways, in the discretion of said trustees.I have in mind in this article the aims and activities of the Bright Vacation School but leave to the discretion of my trustees the methods to be pursued in carrying out my purpose above expressed. In their discretion my said trustees may pay the whole or any part of the income of said fund to promising girl students, graduates of the Waltham High School, to assist them in paying their expenses at college. When vacancies occur in said board of trustees I request but do not require that the new trustees named shall be members of or persons interested in the Waltham College Club."