Question Authorities : It’s Not Just the ‘A’ Students Who Answered the Bell at County’s Annual Academic Decathlon

The crowd in the high school gymnasium was hushed as the moderator asked who controls the “manned maneuvering unit.” The list of possible answers included the Johnson Space Center, the space shuttle commander, or the correct answer, the astronaut utilizing the unit.

As the moderator announced the correct response, the crowd broke into cheers for the more than 100 students answering that segment of the competition. And among those who answered correctly was Santa Ana High School senior Julio Bobadilla, who threw his arms up in the air. Success, for the moment, was sweet.

The team from Santa Ana was not expected to do well in Saturday’s academic decathlon that drew 48 schools from across Orange County. But the approximately 400 decathlon competitors knew that just being there was an accomplishment in itself.

“Nobody cares. There’s a lot of apathy,” Santa Ana team member Blanca Cervantes said of the difficulty in forming a team at the school.

Their coach, Sharon Saxton, added that while students at other schools begin preparing for the tournament in the summer, her students face demands that prevent them from studying full time.

“There are so many time pressures on our kids that others do not have in other areas of the county. The kids have either jobs or full-time adult responsibilities at home. They just feel stressed,” she said. And for eight of the nine members of the team, English was not their native language.

Saturday’s daylong competition held at El Dorado High School tested students of all grade point averages in the areas of mathematics, science, social science, literature, health, economics and fine arts. Students also were required to write an essay, deliver prepared and impromptu speeches, and go through an interview.

The event climaxed with the “Super Quiz,” a series of 30 questions in the category of space exploration. It was the only portion of the contest in which the nine-member teams competed as units, instead of on an individual basis.

Students from Laguna Hills felt a different kind of pressure that others would envy--the pressure to win again.

Their school won the countywide competition two years in a row and won the state championship last year, coming in second to Texas in the national finals. This year the Laguna Hills team began practicing in July with the same intensity of a football team trying to hold on to its state title.

“Any time you are successful at anything, whether it’s sports or whatever, they (classmates) expect you the next year to come out and do it even better,” Laguna Hills senior Kirk Brown said.

But team captain Jay Kim credited Brown, a football player, with evenly dividing his time between football and the academic decathlon. The day before the decathlon, Kim said, Brown studied with the group, scored the winning touchdown in the school’s first postseason playoff game, and then returned to a decathlon practice session that lasted until midnight.

Laguna Hills finished second to Sunny Hills in the “Super Quiz” competition, but overall scores will not be disclosed until the awards banquet Nov. 27.

The program’s founder, Orange County’s outgoing Supt. of Schools Robert Peterson, is proud of the program because it requires one-third of each team to be made up of students with a “C” average or below.

“It’s for all students. It’s not elitist,” he said.

Although defeated in the Nov. 6 election by John F. Dean after 24 years in office, Peterson continued Saturday to plan for next year’s international decathlon competition that will allow teams from the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Asia to compete in person, via satellite, or through computer hook-ups.