Wa-Hi students ace national poetry contest

A team of students representing Walla Walla High School recently won highest honors in this year’s WordWright Challenge, a national competition for high school students requiring close reading and analysis of many different kinds of prose and poetry.  Participating with 596 school teams from all across the country, the school’s eleventh graders tied for sixth place in the nation in the year’s first meet, held in October. The premise behind the WordWright Challenge is that attentive reading and sensitivity to language are among the most important skills students acquire in school.  

 

Students at the school who won the highest individual honors in the meet included juniors Cora Cole (who earned a perfect score), Emily Atkinson, Seth Chapman, Brian Mott, and Amanda Skurski; and senior Nick Brittain.  Freshmen Mary (Grace) McKeirnan and John (Cameron) Peters both earned honorable mention.  More than 69,000 students from across the country participated in the meet.  The students were supervised by Jill Meliah.