Education notebook: Valley Christian School earns first place at Knowledge Bowl

Valley Christian School finished first not only in its division, but also in the all-size school competition at the regional Knowledge Bowl, held Feb. 21 at Whitworth University.

More than 50 schools competed in the Knowledge Bowl, which challenges students on their mastery of high school subjects and current events. Nine Spokane County schools took first in their respective divisions to qualify for state.

Valley Christian, coached by Cathy Hopson, is believed to be the first Class 1B school to win the all-size prize, according to Justin Barrs, Valley Christian’s director of development.

The top nine overall placers and their team members are:

1. Valley Christian, Class 1B (Adam Bruno, Alex Chadduck, Sam Reese, Miina Efta, Evan Craciun and Cameron Simonds);

2. St. George’s, 2B (Gabi Cunningham, Tariq Ravasia, Alec Bunn and Jake Gliniak);

3. Freeman, 1A (Thomas Willard, Sydney Arnzen, Owen Bryant, Chris Barron, Ryan Hicks, Eli Mounts);

4. Pullman, 2A (Melody Gebremedhin, Jay Sahaym, Matthew Reisenauer, Om Sahaym);

5. Lewis and Clark, 4A (Jacob Ryse, Matt Glaser, Noah Williams, Joe Trefry, Ben Louie, Bennett Nye, Owen Middleton, Chloe Wiley and Bri Dashiell);

6. Garfield-Palouse, 1B (Ethan Cook, Tovah Brantner, Danny Laughary, Olivia Knauff and Patrick Orfe);

7. Gonzaga Prep, 4A (Alice Groffman, Andrew Nordhagen, AJ Patterson, Christian Schueller, Shobhin Logani and Matt Thompson);

8. Lakeside (Nine Mile Falls), 1A (Daniel Baerman, Kaitlynn Rezansoff, Mary Chaffee, Kathryn Whitmer, Corbin Meyring, Abby Dallabetta, Ryan Mace, Josh Baerman, Jamison Talley and Raina Ashley); and

9. Riverside, 1A (includes Lucas Burns, Thomas Baldwin, Tristan Montgomery and Evan Miller).

In all, 17 regional schools qualified for state. Other qualifiers by classification are:

1A: Oakesdale and Odessa.

2B: Wilbur-Creston, Reardan-Edwall, Spokane Valley Tech, Liberty and Jenkins (Chewelah).

1A: Deer Park.

The state finals will be March 21 in Yakima.

Funeral homes open essay contest to 7th-graders

Pacific Northwest Cremation and Funeral and Fairmount Memorial Park are sponsoring an essay contest for seventh-grade students in Spokane County.

The essay theme is “Back in Time.” Essays should be about a Spokane resident from the past, whether a relative or not, and what the city was like at their time. Finalists will be judged during a 5-minute presentationCostumes or visual-aides are encouraged. Winners will recieve a cash prize, ride a float in the Lilac Festival Armed Forces Torchlight Parade in May and present their essay during the Fairmount Memorial Association’s Memorial Day weekend.

Essays are due by April 1. They should be emailed to funeral director Jason Armstrong at jasona@pnwcremation.com. For more information visit fairmountmemorial.com/backintime or call (509) 926-2020.

On Track pack thousands of meals for Kidz

On Track Academy students recently packed 6,336 individual oatmeal meals for Food for Kidz.

The juniors and seniors of Scott Sorensen’s flagship advisory class chose to send a portion of the meals to Uganda and Kenya, and are making plans to donate to local organizations.

Food for Kidz is a nonprofit organization that hosts mobile food packing events and partners with other organizations to feed children and their families, both here and abroad. For more information, or to attend a packing event, visit foodforkidz.org/how-to-help/start-planning, or call (320) 221-1675.

Mead juniors win district’s robotics meet

Mead High School has announced the winners of its robotics competition in which teams of students must make quick changes to both their robot and the code that runs it through a series of challenges.

First place were juniors Brendan Mulilns, Nic Caballero, Parker Helgeson and Alex Hajjar; second place, sophomores and seniors, Megan Findley, Anjali Gunning, Nathan Nguyen, Luke Lewis and Owen Evans; and third place, seniors Collin Adams, William Greiner, Keegan Tran, Kyle Kuka, Eli Eldridge and Colby Grosse.

The contest is open to all high school students in the Mead School District and is held every year. Students have access to kits, a CNC plasma cutter, a CNC wood router, 3D printers, laser engraveing machines and other classroom-resources to aid in building robots from scratch.

The students were given four challenges including an obstacle course, a virtual reality course and an object transport course, in which they must operate their robots to pick up objects.