Academic Aces : Now L.A. Can Brag as Marshall High Team Wins State Battle of Wits
The high IQ team from John Marshall High School captured the state championship in the grueling battle of the brains known as the Academic Decathlon, officials announced Monday. The victory marked the first time that a school from the Los Angeles Unified School District has won the 8-year-old annual competition and gave Marshall a spot in the national finals next month.
Beverly Hills High school, the state winner for the previous three years, placed third this year. Palo Alto High School, another previous state champion, was second.
“We are going to find a way to put it together and win the nationals. We are going to study our butts off,” said Marshall’s coach, David Tokofsky, who described his team as “ecstatic” over the victory and celebrating in their Sacramento hotel rooms.
Team member Howard Wu said the Marshall group was afraid that Palo Alto might slip ahead in the final round. “This is great,” said Wu, a senior. “If we lost, I think we all would have gone insane. We studied so hard for this.”
The victory was especially sweet, team members and Marshall administrators said, because Marshall, which is in the Silver Lake-Los Feliz area, does not have a very affluent student body compared to most of the previous state and city winners. Marshall has held the Los Angeles city title for two years, breaking a four-year domination by Palisades High School in the well-to-do Pacific Palisades.
Marshall’s principal, Donald Hahn, said that about half of his students come from low-income neighborhoods in Silver Lake and East Hollywood. “It’s nice to beat schools where they are totally affluent,” he said.
In an entire day of testing Saturday at California State University, Sacramento, contestants on 46 teams from around California took written tests in such subjects as Renaissance art, constitutional law, science and math. That was followed by a round of judged speeches and interviews and topped by the Super Quiz, an event similar to television’s “College Bowl.”
According to the results announced Monday at a luncheon in Sacramento, Marshall’s team garnered a total of 47,772 points out of a possible 60,000. Palo Alto’s score was 46,876. Beverly Hills scored 44,129.
Competing for Marshall were Ethan McKinney, Ben Wolf, Matthew Elstein, David Florey and Christopher Nichelson and Wu. Silva Darbinian, Gideon Javier and Stephanie Shelton took the tests as alternates. Also on the team are Susie Kim and David Chan, Tokofsky said.
Donald Primrose, executive director of the California Academic Decathlon, said Monday that he believes Marshall has an “excellent” chance of winning the national competition, which is scheduled for April 25 in Irving, Tex.
Boosting that chance is the fact that the national champion for the past two years, J. J. Pearce High School of Richardson, Tex., lost its state finals and will not be in the nationals.
Quipped Marshall team member Elstein: “I do so like Texas in the spring.”
Primrose attributed Marshall’s state victory to Tokofsky’s assembling a group of well-rounded students and to the students’ strong desire to beat Beverly Hills. Since the school year began, team members prepared for the city and state competitions in a special class each school day and often at night and on weekends, cramming their heads with the facts and forms of hydrogen bonding, Renaissance painting, quadratic equations and Shakespearean sonnets.
The news of Marshall’s victory was announced over the school’s public address system Monday afternoon, setting off a round of cheers. The school, on Tracy Street near Griffith Park, is planning a party for the team later in the week, Hahn said.
