The first time Cami Wood got straight A’s, she assumed it was a fluke. “I thought, ‘Isn’t that nice of them? Oh, they’re being so nice,’” said Wood, 37, of her instructors in the Lower Columbia College GED program.

But the A’s kept coming, and Wood — who as a teen mother dropped out of a Bellevue, Wash., high school nearly 20 years earlier — eventually came to accept that her continued 4.0 GPA was the result of her late hours and drive for perfection.

The hard work paid off. Wood will graduate this spring with her associates degree and the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship. Wood is one of 40 community college students — out of 800 applicants — to earn the scholarship.

The award will give Wood up to $30,000 a year to study psychology and political science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She plans to later enroll at BYU law school and possibly teach law herself some day.

LCC President Jim McLaughlin surprised Wood with flowers and announced she’d won the scholarship last Tuesday at the LCC tutoring center, where Wood works part time.

Returning to school hasn’t been easy for Wood — who’s also raising three boys (ages 15, 13, and 11) and running two of her own part-time businesses: a business consulting service and Cami’s Custom Catering.

To spend as much time as possible with her husband and boys, Wood only does homework after 10 p.m., when her children go to bed, or at 5 a.m. before they wake up.

“Family has to come first. If that fails, no other success will matter,” she said.

She also volunteers as a Boy Scout leader, soccer coach and volunteer for Longview’s Summer Reading Program.

Wood said she’s grateful to receive the Jack Kent Cooke scholarship, which will allow her to spend more time with family while attending school in Provo. The family is moving there this summer.

LCC law instructor Jerry Zimmerman, who helped nominate Wood for the scholarship, describes her as a perfectionist known for asking instructors after class about comments written in the margins of her papers.

“She wants to know what she can do to make the paper better,” Zimmerman said.

Wood said she views each of her classes as the “foundation for the rest of my education.”

“If I’m going to sacrifice my sleep, my weight, my children, I’m going to learn,” she said. “I probably could have done half the work and still gotten A’s … I probably didn’t need to go in with a first draft of a paper (to an instructor) to see ‘is this what you’re looking for?’ I probably could have not done that. But if you’re going to spend the time, why not do it right?”

Wood earned her GED in 2006 and will graduate this spring with her associates degree. She credits Jon, her husband of 14 years, for supporting her dreams of going back to school and making it possible for her to be a stay-at-home mom when their children were young. Jon sometimes worked two or three jobs to support the family, she said.

“He’s been a huge support, my number one champion,” she said.

Cami Wood doesn’t look back with regret on her past mistakes. Instead she credits them all as valuable learning experiences that helped make her a better mother and person. She said being a teen mother forced her to rise up from a difficult childhood and say to herself, “You are so much better than this.”

“It was a turning point to make my life what I want it to be.”