Teen Addresses A Town’s Need Boy’s Single-Handed Effort Gets Rosalia Organized

Seventeen-year-old Jacob Schanzenbach discovered there were a number of things wrong with the way buildings were numbered in his hometown of Rosalia.

While working on a project for the volunteer fire department, Schanzenbach found there was no formal system for assigning addresses to the homes and businesses in Rosalia, a town of nearly 600 people about 35 miles south of Spokane.

He worried that the lack of standardized addresses could confuse firefighters and ambulance drivers trying to find people who needed help.

“In some cases, there were three, four or five different numbers for the same building,” Schanzenbach said Friday. “It was kind of a mess.”

So he fixed it, spending more than five months designing and implementing a standardized address scheme for the town.

His efforts won him the grudging respect of town residents - some of whom didn’t want to change their addresses - and a national award for community service.

Schanzenbach, a junior at Liberty High School in Spangle, this week was named one of 104 students from across the United States to win a Prudential Spirit of Community Award.

“This program honors fine young people who choose to make a difference in society by the noblest means possible - offering their own time and talents for the good of their communities,” U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., said in a news release announcing the winners.

Bradley and Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum, R-Kan., will play host to the winners at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in May.

Schanzenbach fits that description, Rosalia Mayor Ken Jacobs said.

Jacobs said Schanzenbach approached the City Council about the address problem last year, and members decided to turn him loose on it.

The teenager who keeps the scorebook for the Liberty High girls and boys basketball teams consulted maps, identified every building in town and wrote a system that the town can use, Jacobs said.

“He did it all himself,” the mayor said. “It took a lot of time and a lot of legwork.”

There also was a little controversy.

“There’s been some grumbling,” Jacobs said. “A lot of us had to change our addresses, and some people didn’t like that. But in the long run, it will help us. It will definitely help in emergency response.”

Schanzenbach will get a silver medallion, $1,000 in cash and a trip to Washington, D.C., for winning the award.

He said he’s looking forward to the trip and the cash, but that he didn’t even know about the Spirit of Community Service Award when he embarked on his project.

“I wasn’t looking for any recognition or anything,” he said. “I just thought it needed to be done.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo