Acdec team brings home sixth regional championship

The Bandera High School Academic Decathlon team fought hard to bring home the 4A Regional Championship this past weekend for the sixth year in a row.

The team traveled to Corpus Christi and again won top honors by beating all 4A teams and coming in first in the Super Quiz. The team will advance to state competition on February 25-27 at the Frisco campus of Collin College.

Academic Decathlon is a thematic competition in which students compete in ten events: essay, speech, interview, math, science, music, art, literature, economics, and social science. This year, the theme is: “Water, A Most-Essential Resource.”

Participants are divided into three categories, honors, scholastic, and varsity depending upon their grade averages.

Team members are Megan Mize, Savannah Venegas, William “Ozzie” Knowles, Laurel Morsi, Emily Ramos, Karina Garcia, Chandler Knowles, Christopher Pallesen and Riley Longobardi. The team is coached by Joe Cortez and Dan Zavorka.

The BHS team won thirty individual medals and three team members were recognized as overall top scorers.

The following students won individual medals:

• Chandler Knowles (gold in interview with a perfect score of 1000, gold in economics, gold in art, gold in literature, bronze in speech, bronze in social science, and a gold for overall high scoring varsity contestant)

• William “Ozzie” Knowles (bronze in art, silver in literature, bronze in music, gold in science, gold in social science, and bronze for being the third-highest scoring honors contestant)

• Riley Longobardi (silver in essay, silver in art, gold in economics, silver in literature, bronze in math, bronze in science, silver in music, silver in social science, and bronze in overall for being the third-highest scoring varsity contestant)

• Christopher Pallesen (gold in music, bronze in essay, and bronze in economics)

• Laurel Morsi (bronze in literature, and bronze in science)

• Savannah Venegas (gold in literature and bronze in science)

• Megan Mize (silver in interview)