John Marshall High School Academic Decathlon Team Needs Your Help! By Joanna Erdos

Congratulations to the John Marshall High School Academic Decathlon Team for winning 2nd Place in the LAUSD competition held January 26 and February 2, 2013, at Roybal High School.  Hundreds of decathletes representing 58 high school teams in the district competed in a two-day contest consisting of  written tests in Art, Economics, Essay, Language and Literature, Math, Science, Social Science, and Music.  Additionally, students gave both a prepared speech and an impromptu speech, and were interviewed by a panel of judges.  The only public event was the Super Quiz oral relay, held on February 2 in the gym at Roybal HS.  The results of the contest were announced in a ceremony held on Friday, February 9 at Hollywood High School.  This year’s theme was Russia.

Marshall won 2nd Place for the second year in a row and has qualified for the California Academic Decathlon to be held in Sacramento March 15-17. A total of 10 LAUSD schools have advanced to the State finals, and from there, two teams will advance to the National contest to be held in Minneapolis the fourth week of April. We are aiming to be one of those two!

Coach Larry Welch is justly proud of his team members: Aninda Bhowmick, Natasha Boyd, Ashley Cruz, Jose Herrera, Julio Lopez, Kevin Martinez, Marvin Paparisto, Amy Tan, and Angelica Tecson.

The team tied for 1st Place in the Super Quiz with overall winner Granada Hills Charter High School, and won team awards in 10 of the 11 events.  Also, individual awards were won by team members.  Natasha Boyd won the Larry McCormick Award for the highest scoring student in the Language and Literature category, and Marvin Paparisto won both the Perryman Award for the highest scoring student in Economics and he was named the Top Scoring Student in the entire competition, with 9252.9 points out of a possible 10,000. 

The John Marshall High Alumni Association has been a strong supporter of the Academic Decathlon for many years and is now in the process of raising funds to send the team of nine students and two adults to Sacramento.  The school district requires a chaperone but will not pay for that person; they can only pay a small portion of the other expenses and we need to raise $10,000.   If you would like to help, please send your donation to the John Marshall High Alumni Association, PO Box 39847, Los Angeles, CA 90039.  Please mark “Aca Deca” in the memo section.  You may pay online using PayPal if you have an account. Go to www.paypal.com and send your payment to johnmarshallla@gmail.com with a note in the comment box that the payment is for ACADECA.  The Alumni Association is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization and all donations are tax-deductible.