Folsom student earns scholarship from diabetes company. Here’s how she lives with Type 1

A Folsom student earned approximately $1,100 through a Skin Grip diabetes scholarship.

Grace Gurley, 17, graduates from Vista Del Lago in a month. She was one of 25 selected individuals that won a scholarship from Skin Grip, a company that makes adhesive tape for those with Type 1 diabetes to secure monitoring devices to the skin to improve their quality of life.

“Individuals living with diabetes deserve to be recognized for their resilience and determination to keep going even when things get tough,” said Dror Liebenthal, the chief executive officer of Bold.org, an independent scholarship platform that promotes the Skin Grip fund, via email.

Gurley said she plans on attending Samford University in Homewood, Alabama, and her goal is to earn a bachelor’s degree in secondary education to become a high school math teacher.

“I’ve always been interested in teaching,” she said. “I have helped tutor my younger sister. I just love teaching. I love math and so I’d love to teach it for my career.”

Gurley said she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 8 months old, and no one else in her immediate family suffers from the disease. For most of her life, however, she said she has fought to find a cure for it.

“Right after I was diagnosed, my parents became involved with (the) Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and we’ve created our own team called Grace’s Gang,” she said. “We’ve raised money from friends and family and throughout garage sales. I’ve spoken at auctions and galas.”

Gurley’s mother, Christy Gurley, said that she is proud of her daughter’s hard work academically and of the responsibility she has in managing her diabetes. She said such an early diagnosis benefited her daughter because she established healthy eating habits early on, and “she didn’t have habits to break.”

“She was diagnosed at 8 months old, which is extremely difficult when a child cannot talk or tell you how they feel because we did not have the continuous glucose monitor and technology that we have today. So, there was a lot of guessing,” Christy Gurley said. “It’s just so nice and it’s neat for us to see her be rewarded for something that she has dealt with her entire life.”