Several former classmates of the two daughters of Half and Susanne Zantop -- the two Dartmouth professors fatally stabbed in their Etna home last January -- have come together to create a fund in honor of the couple.
The fund will provide an annual grant to the foreign language department of Hanover High School.
The grant is intended to help advance the study of languages and promote global understanding.
"We had a question of what we could do to help," said fund co-founder Tris Wykes, who attended Hanover High School with the Zantops' daughters.
"In the long run, we wanted to try to benefit the Hanover community and especially young people in the community, because it's young people who were very important to Half and Susanne Zantop," he explained.
Originally from Germany, the Zantops were frequent world travelers and, according to the fund's founders, happily shared their diverse cultural knowledge and experiences with the children of Hanover.
"I think they saw a purpose to not only educate their children but the children that their children interacted with," Wykes said.Wykes and several other members of Hanover High School's classes of 1989 and 1991 began working to establish the fund shortly after the couple's death.
The fund has already received $15,000 in donations, and its founders hope to collect an additional $15,000 over the next five years in order to ensure its permanent endowment.
Faculty members at Hanover High School will work with the school to determine how the money will be spent. Possible targets of funding include foreign study programs or trips abroad for students.
The assets of the fund are received and managed by the Upper Valley Community Foundation, the Hanover-based regional division of the non-profit Vermont and New Hampshire Community Foundations.
Other founders of the fund include Katie Cioffi Delgado, Julie Edwards Vale, Sarah Manchester, Jenn Randolph Gasparro, Tania Lihatsh, Jann Douple and Dan Schumann.
Send tax-deductible donations to: The Half and Susanne Zantop Fund, Upper Valley Community Foundation, PO Box 995, Hanover, NH 03755.
For more info contact Lisa Cashdan at (603) 653-0387 or lgc@nhcf.org.
