Sacramento, CA…Bret Harte Junior Jessica Dominick won a silver medal in Speech. Summerville ACADEC team members bring home medals in speech and music. Bret Harte Junior Jessica Dominick earned a silver in the Academic Decathlon Speech Division III Honors Division.

Left To Right: Michala Scholkowfsky, Summerville, Jessica Dominick, Bret Harte, Sydney Jones, Summerville, Skyler Ryan, Summerville

“Jessica has been working very hard for the past 10 months for this competition,” stated Bret Harte co-coach Jennifer Truman. “Especially on her speech. She chose a topic that she is very passionate about and I am sure that it was that passion in her speech that put a medal around her neck.”

The topic of Dominick’s speech was sustainable architecture, or more specifically, green roofs.
“Her speech focused around the benefits of having a green roof and even having the ability to grow food on them,” said Truman.

Dominick also was awarded highest over-all score for her team. Dominick joined three ACADEC team-members from the regional championship team, Summerville High School.

This is the first time back to the state competition for Bret Harte in several years. Each school competed at three different levels, with three members per team. Representing Bret Harte were:

Jr Emily Buss, Jr Adelaide Ellsworth, Jr Raen Kuykendall, Jr Jessica Dominick, Jr Chloe Rowton, Jr Claudia Loomis, So Gurlovellen Kaur, Jr Cristina Shockey, and Sr Jacob Stockburger.

The Academic Decathlon is a competition in which the students compete in 10 different categories based on a central theme, this years theme was WWII. The decathletes to tests in Art, Essay, Language/Literature, Music, Math, Science, Social Science, Economics, Interview, and a speech, the top three at each level earn medals.

“It’s a long weekend for the kids,” said Truman. “Overall, for being a relatively new group of kids to go to this level it was a real learning experience, and we hope to learn from this experience to come back next year.”

Division III

Team Scores: Objective Overall

Tests SuperQuiz* Score*

Tuolumne Summerville 33,863.40 3,450.00 37,313.40 15th out 28
Calaveras Bret Harte 34,008.70 2,850.00 36,858.70 17th out of 28

** Because of possibly cheating in the SuperQuiz, the state committee threw out this part of the competition, therefore the Overall Score reverts back to simply the Objective score which would drop Summerville down and put Bret Harte up.