Erika Fabbri and Mollie Skorski got to Maricopa from completely different directions, but both stories end the same way: unexpectedly building a life here. 

Fabbri came from Italy and hated Maricopa at first. The drive down State Route 347 felt bleak and lonely; nothing like the world she had left behind. Now she is the one trying to explain this city to readers in her hometown paper in Vicenza. From crying on the drive in to espousing Maricopa’s beauty back home, it says a lot.

Skorski’s story is even more personal. After spending over a decade searching for her biological family from a New York City apartment, she ended up in Maricopa, and this is where the biggest parts of her story happened. It’s where she chose to live, where she got married and where her adoptive and biological families came together. 

In both stories, Maricopa is where things got real.

That same idea shows up again with Robert Russell, even though his story starts from the opposite direction. He did not move here from somewhere else; he grew up here. But being from a place and seeing value in it are not the same thing. Russell is choosing to look closely at his hometown, to find something worth noticing in its cars and street corners. 

Our annual Senior Spotlights tradition pushes that idea forward. All these students could have attached themselves to schools elsewhere in the Valley. They did not. They represented Maricopa schools, and now they are taking that hometown identity with them to colleges across Arizona and across the country — from Columbia to Wisconsin to Richmond to ASU, U of A, NAU and beyond. 

For a place still young enough to be underestimated, Maricopa keeps proving it is not just somewhere people pass through.