Bowling Green’s Perennial Math winners included, from left, Jessa Donaldson, Gabe Lust, Silas Kieffer-Airhart, Aiden Xu and Ruby Underwood. Mazie Perkins was not present.
Bowling Green’s PACE students have taken top honors in an international math competition.
Laura Weaver, the gifted intervention specialist for the district, reported on her students Perennial Math awards at Tuesday’s school board meeting.
Each year, one of the most challenging assignments in PACE is the Perennial Math competition and monthly tests, she said.
The international Perennial Math program is a competition that offers accelerated logic math problems to students with all math skills and abilities. Students take one test each month, each with six questions, and are given team and individual points.
To prepare, they conduct weekly practice quizzes from previous math challenges.
Bowling Green students started competing in the program in 2013, and since then have won gold medals with perfect scores every year, Weaver said.
The competition, which was held January through April, had 2,695 students representing 174 teams in grades 3-8, she said.
A perfect score is 24 points.
There are three team levels – rookie, intermediate and advanced.
Rookie teams, for grades 3-4, needed a team score of 198. Bowling Green’s team scored 213, which was the highest score for all teams.
Only nine students had a perfect score and two of them were from Bowling Green: Ruby Underwood and Silas Kieffer-Airhart, who were in fourth grade last year.
Jessa Donaldson was in third grade last year when she earned a gold medal.
Intermediate teams, for grades 5-6, had to have a score of 157 and Bowling Green’s team scored 207, which was also the highest team score of all participants, Weaver said.
There were two students with perfect scores, and both were from Bowling Green: Aiden Xu and Mazie Perkins, both fourth graders last year.
Fifth grader Gabe Lust had a perfect store as well. He has been a gold medalist every year since third grade and started taking middle school math in fourth grade. This year while in sixth grade he is taking Algebra I, Weaver said.
Advanced team competition, for grades 7-8, is the most difficult for her students as it challenges the logics of math at an accelerated seventh and eight grade level. The advanced team needed a team score of 138 and only one fifth grade team had a perfect score.
“Yes, you guessed it. Our PACE team of fifth graders took this honor out of all teams participating,” Weaver said.
Aiden Xu also was one if six $200 scholarship winners for his essay on “Reversing the Negativity Associated with Students and Gaming.”
The Northwest Ohio Consortium of Coordinators for the Gifted, of which Weaver is a member, presented the award.
He is using the money to create positive games for academics, Weaver said.
The PACE program serves superior cognitive ability students in grades 3-6 one day a week. PACE stands for Providing Acceleration, Creativity, and Enrichment and students are assessed for superior cognitive abilities for admission. They can be referred to PACE by a parent or teacher.
