Way to go! Comsewogue senior Raquel Saenz

Raquel Saenz, a senior at Comsewogue High School in Port Jefferson Station, was the grand prize winner of the third annual Hispanic Heritage Month essay contest coordinated by Cablevision's "Power to Learn," a K-12 initiative to make technology in the classroom useful.

Saenz, in the award-winning essay, described her efforts as a third-grader to use her bilingual abilities to communicate with a new student from Bolivia who did not speak English. The award was announced earlier this month. "I felt proud knowing I used my Spanish to help someone," Saenz, 17, wrote in her essay. "Even more so, I was grateful I knew Spanish at all, for it had led to the start of a friendship."

She received a $5,000 savings bond and a $2,500 donation was made in her name to Adelante of Suffolk County, a nonprofit that provides services to seniors, youths and people with special needs.

Saenz said the contest also interested her because her parents were immigrants to the U.S. Her mother came from the Dominican Republic in the 1980s, she said, and her father from Ecuador in the 1960s. The contest was sponsored by Olympusat, a provider of Spanish channels, and Cablevision, which owns Newsday.