The teams represented Lapeer East High School, Zemmer and Rolland-Warner middle schools and Seaton, Lynch and Turrill elementary schools.Five of those teams took home trophies for their presentations at the State Bowl, which is the culmination of a year-long program where students are taught to creatively seek, attack, and solve problems related to projections into the future.
These students had been hard at work on their problem-solving skills since the beginning of October, meeting after school once a week. An estimated 1,000 Michigan students worked on three problems during the 2010 - 2011 school year – Healthy Living, Air Transportation, and Genetic Testing – which were scored and critiqued by trained evaluators.
A total of 93 of Michigan FPS teams across three grade divisions (4-6, 7-9, and 10-12) were invited to participate in the State Bowl. While teams knew the general topic of this year’s Bowl – Water Quality – they did not know the specific nature of the problem they attempted to solve until the Bowl began.
One junior team which included Sarah Ridenour (Rolland-Warner MS 6th grade), Jacob Schlaud (Zemmer MS 6th grade), Ben Mitchell and Nathan Carr (Seaton ES 5th grade) took 4th place in the state in writing their 11-page booklet. That was just two places away from qualifying for the International Bowl in the junior division.
Two teams made it to the semi-final round, a junior team of 5th graders from Turrill, including Jullian Felton, Nathan Jasper, Kane Sweet, and Zach Bergstrom, and a middle team that included East 9th grader Nicole Romolino, Rolland-Warner 7th grader Zach Fritz, Zemmer 8th grader Alycia Mausolf and Zemmer 7th grader Alexis Mosher.
Two junior teams also had success in the presentation of their action plan. Taking a second in their presentation were Zemmer 6th graders Greg Schabel, James Felton and Steven Romolino and Seaton 5th grader Leah Bentley. Taking a third place were Zemmer 6th graders Olivia Card and Brooklyn Withey and Seaton 5th graders Pierce Logan and Chad Buike.
The Lapeer teams’ coach, Steve Larzelere-Kellermann, was named state FPS coach of the year.
Lapeer Community Schools can be proud of the showing our students had at the event.
