KSH academic decathletes place second in national competition

Another U.S. Academic Decathlon banner is coming back to Kea‘au following a second consecutive second-place finish at the national competition.

Apr. 20, 2015

Contributed by Shaundor Chillingworth

For the second year in a row, the KS Hawai‘i Academic Decathlon team placed second in the United States Academic Decathlon (USAD) competition, beating teams from across the nation, China and London. The event took place from April 16 through 18 in Garden Grove, CA

The seven-member KS Hawai‘i team was coming off a fourth consecutive state title and a second-place finish at last year’s national competition.

The academic decathlon is a 10-event scholastic competition which includes the following categories: art, economics, essay, interview, language and literature, mathematics, music, science, speech and social science. The theme of this year’s competition was “New Alternatives in Energy: Ingenuity and Innovation.”

Teams compete in three different divisions based upon the size of their school, and students are arranged into three sub-divisions (honors, scholastic and varsity) based upon individual student GPAs.

The KS Hawai‘i team is made up of seniors Ciarra-Lynn Parinas and Sage Constantinou, juniors Raiden Domingo, Tom Ikeda and Caleb Leslie, and freshmen Jacob Perry and Kepola Ishikawa. High school math kumu Dane Nelson serves as the coach of the Academic Decathlon team.

This year’s team also built off of last year’s success, by earning 2nd place honors in the competition’s Super Quiz Relay. Also, at least one student earned a medal in every single academic category.

With a score of 7,345.7, Constantinou was recognized as the highest scoring team member. Competing in the scholastic division, he won a gold medal in science, two silver medals in art and speech and 2 bronze medals in economics and social science.

Parinas was selected by her teammates as the most valuable team member for demonstrating leadership, team spirit, positive attitude, and academic achievement. She also scored an honors division gold medal in the interview category.

Perry earned an impressive eight individual medals in the varsity division including silver awards in science, speech and art and bronze awards in essay, music, literature, economics and social science.

Both Constantinou and Perry were also awarded overall individual honors in their respective divisions, which earned them each a $500 scholarship.

Leslie won a varsity division bronze medal in math and was also recognized as a Founders Scholarship award winner as the varsity student in division three who achieved the greatest increase in score from the state competition to the national competition.

Ishikawa earned a varsity division bronze award in speech and Ikeda earned a scholastic division silver medal in the essay category.

Look for official results to be posted on usad.org in the coming weeks. Congratulations to all of these haumāna and their kumu for their continued success!

Mahalo to KS Hawai‘i Curriculum and Assessment Coordinator Dory Shigematsu for sharing photos and updates from the competition.

USAD captures senior Ciarra-Lynn Parinas before competing in the speech category. Parinas was voted team MVP.