Pageant winner struggles for her scholarship

Nobody ever said beauty pageants were easy.

These days, girls must strut in stilettos and show off their talents - and then, sometimes, engage in a two-year battle to get the money they were awarded.

That was the case for first-year MBA student Ashley Wood, who has yet to receive the nearly $21,000 she won at a number of 2004 pageants, including the Miss Charleston and Miss South Carolina competitions.

The Miss South Carolina Organization is alleging that Wood did not follow the proper procedure for obtaining her scholarships - a procedure clearly stated in the rules, which Wood was required to read four times.

The first rule in the regulations requires winners to use all their earnings from one competition before applying to use money from a higher one.

As a result, Wood was required to use the funds from her first victory before using the Miss South Carolina winnings.

The Miss America Organization franchises both pageants.

Competition comptroller Gail Sander alleges that Wood forfeited her winnings by allowing the extended deadline for using her local scholarship money to pass.

But Wood says she never received a response from the Miss America Organization after applying for that extension to the deadline.

The Miss America Organization, however, says that Miss South Carolina Scholarship program director Randall Dukes sent documents granting the extension to Wood, who says she never received a copy.

She originally planned on using the money from her local pageant winnings to take a math class at a local college in May 2006.

But after Dukes signed a form promising to pay for Wood's math class, she never heard from him again despite repeated phone calls, letters and e-mails, she said.

She ultimately paid for the class on her own.

Dukes did not return repeated requests for comment for this article.

"They are supposedly a scholarship organization, so it seems to me like if they had local directors who are not filling their obligations, they would either step in and make them pay it, or bypass that and just go ahead and give me the state scholarship," Wood said.

The state scholarship, which Wood technically won but never received, is $20,000 - $50,000 shy of the cost of one year in Wharton's MBA

program. Wood was planning on putting the money toward her tuition.

The Miss America Organization is defending the local organizations.

"No one participating in a nationally accredited scholarship competition like ours can arbitrarily rewrite the rules to suit themselves, then cry foul when those rules aren't bent or broken to satisfy them," Miss America Organization spokeswoman Sharon Pearce wrote in a statement.

This isn't the first time the pageant's handling of money has come under question.

In 2004, the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division and the South Carolina Secretary of State's Office began an investigation of the Miss South Carolina Organization, which had been accused of financial irregularities and failing to properly distribute scholarship monies.

"I feel a responsibility to do what I can to stop this from happening to other people," Wood said, though she has not yet filed a lawsuit against any of the organizations.

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