Latin students shine at state forum

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Cassidy Corey

Latin students look out over the balcony of their hotel room to talk to others walking by.

It’s not every day that Latin students get to go on a three-day field trip to Orlando to compete in the state forum, but when the competition happens, the students make it count. The competition was held at the Wyndham Resort in Orlando.. The students arrived midday Thursday and stayed until the closing ceremony Saturday. While there students participated in either two tests on a wide variety of topics pertaining to Roman and Greek language, culture and geography or they could submit one test and a creative project to be judged. After judging students were allowed to walk around and view them.

“There was just an incredible and awe-inspiring feeling I got when I saw how beautiful some of the projects were,” Eileen H. an eighth-grade Latin 2 student said. “Some projects looked like something out of a museum, and lots of them were very accurate and showed how much time the people put into them.”

During the opening ceremony students were told that there was to be a “spirit competition” for various sized sombreros depending on what place the school scored. 

“We’d come up with a West Shore chant just before and kept screaming it the entire time the judges walked around,” Eileen said. “All of us walked out with sore throats and hoarse voices, but it was the experience that brought all of us closer together within the first day of states.”

But without something unexpected going wrong, the competition wouldn’t really be complete, and in the most Latin student fashion, the most ridiculous thing went wrong.

“We were in the testing room and one of the proctors got on the loudspeaker and asked if anyone had seen a baby duck that had apparently been brought in by one of the younger students,” Olivia H. another eighth-grade Latin 2 student said. “When the proctor started asking about the duck everyone thought it was just some joke, but there was actually a duck. They got it out safely, but they never found out who brought it in.” 

The forum gives Latin students from across Florida an opportunity to connect and form a close knit community.

“Just getting to hang out with my friends and room with them was so cool and brought us closer together.” August T. an eighth- grade Latin 1 student said.

West Shore competed with 41 other schools placing fourth overall in creatives and sixth overall in sweepstakes. The following students received recognition:Brian Duong, second in Hellenic History; Eileen Hatch, first in Miscellaneous 5-9, first in Pandora’s Box, second in Mystery Test; Joseph Konathapally, fourth in Vocabulary II; Sienna Lies, sixth in Latin Literature and second in 2D Art; Daniel Mirell, second in Audio/Visual; Daniel See, fourth in Audio/Visual; Ian Swartz, fourth in Geography; August Terry, first in Drawings; Adelia Torvik, first in Charts/Posters and Caelan Garcia, first in Audio/Visual.

By Cassidy Corey

Editor’s Note: Brevard Public Schools policy prohibits the inclusion of middle-schoolers’ last names on district-sponsored websites.