Ariel Berryman memorial scholarship recipient, Katalina Lopez, and the power of belonging

There is a moment Katalina Lopez carries with her. It is not from a graduation stage or a college acceptance letter, but from a living room floor, when she was 6 years old, teaching her 8-year-old brother how to tie his shoes.

"Despite my brother being older than me, I've often taken on the role of a big sibling, caring for him and teaching him everyday life skills,” Lopez shared. “I've never had so much excitement for a little moment. Seeing my brother jumping up and down in excitement [when he learned] made me feel as if I accomplished a running marathon."

That moment, small and electric all at once, contains everything you need to know about who Lopez is and where she's going.

A member of DSST: Montview's Class of 2026, Lopez is this year's recipient of the Ariel Berryman Memorial Scholarship, an honor that recognizes DSST graduates who embody resilience, leadership and a commitment to giving back. She will be the first person in her family to graduate from high school, and this fall, she heads to CU Denver to study health science on her way to becoming an occupational therapist.

Her path to this moment was not a straight line. In 3rd grade, she struggled through a spelling test while her classmates wrote with ease, and she felt the weight of a learning disability for the first time. In 7th grade, she was dismissed from a school that had already decided she couldn't succeed. That’s when she found DSST.

“My 8th-grade year was beyond great,” Lopez said. “The DSST staff and students made me feel so welcomed, I felt so connected with my community as if I were there since 6th grade.”

Then came high school.

In 9th grade, she stepped onto a college campus and for the first time heard her own voice inspiring her and recognizing her potential.

"I viewed the college campuses that I stepped foot on as a way out of self-doubt," she said. "The voices of failure left my head, and then entered voices of grace."

Lopez left that visit with rejuvenated energy, pushing herself to grow into everything she now saw as possible for herself. It wasn’t an easy journey, but she knew she had the ability to achieve her dreams through hard work and with the support of DSST.

When she struggled academically, teachers didn't let her fall behind. Instead, they offered tutoring, extra credit and the steady message that she was capable.

"Montview has never made me feel 'dumb,'" she said. "The staff pushed me to never give up and to keep pushing."

That support gave her the confidence to lead. As a senior, Katalina stepped up to become president of SOMOS, Montview's Hispanic culture club, after the previous president graduated.

"Being president of my Hispanic club, SOMOS, has greatly shaped who I am today," she said. "The club helped me get out of my comfort zone and bring my community close together."

And she didn't just keep the club alive, she made it a space where students of all backgrounds could learn about and celebrate Hispanic culture together.

That same instinct to reach across difference, to build something bigger than herself, showed up in her goals for the future as well.

Lopez wants to become an occupational therapist because she has seen firsthand what it looks like when people with disabilities are ignored, labeled or mistreated, and she refuses to accept it.

“As an individual who has a brother who is on the spectrum, I wouldn’t want anyone to handle my brother with a single ounce of unjust treatment,” she said.

She plans to serve children with disabilities preparing for independence, elderly patients who have lost the ability to perform daily tasks, and survivors of accidents rebuilding their lives. She wants to give them, in her words, "the comfort that they rarely receive."

The Ariel Berryman Memorial Scholarship was created to honor the memory of a beloved DSST community member and to invest in students who embody the values she lived by. In Katalina Lopez, those values are unmistakable: courage in the face of doubt, responsibility to her community, and an unshakable belief that small moments – a tied shoe, a tutoring session, a club meeting – can change the course of a life.