FERRIDAY — Ferriday High School valedictorian Delandrius Dunbar said he had not thought about attending Philander Smith College until the admissions department made him an offer he could not refuse.

Dunbar, 18, received the president’s scholarship from Philander Smith worth more than $95,000 over four years. He’s already in Little Rock, Ark., settling in the school’s early START program and he’s also seeing some familiar faces on campus.

“I had one (friend) who came with me to the START program, but a few more are actually supposed to come in the fall,” he said.

The private, historically black college had approximately 700 students enrolled in 2010, the last year data could be obtained, Right now, Dunbar said he was learning the ins and outs of the campus, but said he was excited about getting started for real in the fall.

“I’m really getting a feel for the school right now, getting familiar with it and its surroundings,” he said. “Since it is kind of a small school, I feel like it’s gonna be my chance to relive and redo my high school days — just on a larger scale.”

Dunbar said he plans to study biology and ultimately hopes to be in the physical therapy field. Dunbar said he became interested in that field by looking up the word kinesiology.

“I saw (kinesiology) on a flyer from another college and it just looked like an interesting word, so when I looked it up I was like, ‘Oh OK. I can see myself doing this,’ and it really stuck from there,” Dunbar said. “It seems like an interesting field to be in and in it I can get to travel to different places and meet many different people.”

Dunbar, the son of Donetra Cain and Percy Dunbar, said he expected he’d be valedictorian of his class late in the spring semester, but he didn’t know for sure until two days before graduation.

“I was excited to hear that I was valedictorian of my class,” he said.

While at Ferriday High School, Dunbar was also on the football team for all four years, playing offensive line his senior year.

“I just really like football and enjoyed playing the game,” he said. “It is year round, but both coaches I played for stressed that education always came first over anything we did, and they made sure our grades were being taken care of before we went out on the field.”

Coaches were not the only ones pushing him to excel academically.

“My entire family really motivated me to stay in school and do my best,” he said. “Also some teachers helped to push me forward.”

Dunbar said he is excited to begin college, but he’s also going to miss Ferriday High School.

“I’ll miss high school because of all of the friends and memories that are left behind when not only departing high school but also my hometown that I was raised in,” he said. “A lot of people might look down upon Ferriday High School, but I actually feel like it was a great experience to actually see the difference between what others allow to be seen and depicted on the outside of the institution versus what’s really going on on the inside.”