Students win state, national awards
5/22/2015, 2:14 p.m. | Updated on 5/22/2015, 2:54 p.m.
Students from Richmond-based schools have won awards in state and national competitions.
High school and middle school students from the city scored in the annual Technology Student Association competition in Hampton earlier this month.
Two students from the Richmond Technical Center won first place awards. Crystal Taylor was ranked No. 1 in the Prepared Presentation category and Keaja Jefferson won the Transportation Modeling category.
Separately, members of the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School TSA team scored top 10 awards in the Music Production and Children’s Story categories. Also, Maggie Walker’s Matthew Perry placed in the top four in the Essays in Technology category.
Meanwhile, Binford Middle School’s nine-member TSA chapter carried the Richmond Public Schools banner for middle schools into the competition and emerged with second place honors in the Leadership Strategies category and placed in the top five in the Agriculture and Biotechnology category.
Shamella Myrick, president of the Binford TSA Chapter, also was runner-up for the state TSA Member of the Year Award. Binford’s team also placed fourth in Chapter Excellence.
The Binford team’s faculty advisers, LeTonja Mackey and William Peters, praised the team for its results, but noted that “due to limited funding, (the team would not) be able to attend and compete” at the national TSA finals in Dallas in June.
Separately, teams from Maggie Walker placed second in a national history and civics competition and fifth in a national math competition. The 24-member team was coached by Sam Ulmschneider, a Governor’s School alumnus and current social studies teacher.
The second place award came in the annual “We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution” competition sponsored by the Center for Civic Education. The finals were held at George Mason University in Northern Virginia.
The award marks the ninth time since 2003 that a Maggie Walker team has finished in the top three in the event. The school won national titles in 2003 and 2011.
The math team from Maggie Walker defeated 1,100 teams to make the finals in the 10th annual Moody’s Foundation Mega Math Challenge in New York last month. The team won a $5,000 award for its finish.