THOUSAND OAKS : Students Place 1st for Ancestral Map

Three Thousand Oaks students who painted a map that traces their classmates’ ancestry have won $1,500 in a national geography contest.

Kristin Brown, 12, Krista Gary, 13, and Theresa Zemlica, 14, all seventh-grade honor students at Los Cerritos Intermediate School, won the top prize for “Cartographic Excellence” in the American Express Geography competition.

Nearly 9,000 students from 2,000 high schools competed for more than $100,000 in prizes.

They painted their map, which illustrates the diverse background of students attending the school, on the wall of the school cafeteria. More than 30 countries are represented on the 36-square-foot map of the world.

The three girls questioned nearly 600 classmates about their backgrounds and the backgrounds of their parents and grandparents, Brown said.

The variety of backgrounds were illustrated on the map with color-coded stickers that represented different family members.

When the map was complete, students were surprised to see that more students came from Czechoslovakia, Romania and other eastern European countries than from such western European countries as England and France, Brown said.

“It shows how close we really are. We’re tied together by our common heritage,” Brown said.

Brown, Gary and Zemlica were each awarded $500 and a world atlas. In addition, the three students were flown earlier this week to Sacramento, where they participated in an awards ceremony.