The April 2025 Beazer Homes Student of the Month is 15-year-old William “Cliff” Burch, an eighth grader at Ten Oaks Middle School.

Cliff was nominated for Student of the Month because he loves to help everyone and is a great friend to his peers.

Born and raised in the Carolina Forest area, Cliff has attended Carolina Forest area schools and will be a freshman at Carolina Forest High School next fall.

He’s currently taking honors classes and classes that count towards his high school credits.

His favorite class is his full-year honors social studies class taught by Mrs. Jessica McKever.

“She’s an excellent teacher,” he said.

McKever is a great motivator and pushes her students to do their best, he said.

One lesson from McKever’s social studies class Cliff showed interest in was the Orangeburg Massacre.

Recently, Cliff was involved in the state competition for National History Day.

The National History Day competition is a statewide competition held at Coastal Carolina University. At the competition, students across the state showcase a topic of history that they studied, researched and analyzed.

There are different levels of the competition before advancing to the national competition.

Cliff’s focus for his project was the 18th Amendment.

He chose this topic because he wanted to learn more about it, he said.

Cliff worked on his project as part of the English 1 and honors social studies curriculum.

In December, he wrote a paper on the topic and in February and March he created a product to showcase at the competition. The product Cliff chose to make for the competition was a documentary.

He came in first at the regional competition that was also held at CCU and advanced to the state competition where hundreds of students were competing. He wanted to be involved in the competition so he could learn more about history and historical events.

One of his favorite activities in school was in his fundamentals of computing classes.