Academic Achiever Called Dedicated, Caring : Thousand Oaks: Sommer Gentry, 16, earned the top score of 7,147 points in the recent decathlon. She is active in school and her community.

When someone asks Carole Gentry what makes her 16-year-old daughter unique, she thinks of Sommer’s decision to write a book.

When the girl was 11, Gentry recalled, “She said, ‘I’m going to write a book that’s 100 pages.’ ”

So Sommer made a chain of colored paper rings 100 links long, Gentry said, and with each page she wrote, she tore off another ring.

The book, which her mother never read because she was not invited to, is finished and lies in the family’s safety deposit box.

It is that kind of determination and planning, those who know her say, that helped Sommer, a senior at Thousand Oaks High School, walk away earlier this month with the highest individual score at the county’s rigorous academic decathlon--7,147 points. The school’s nine-member team placed third in the contest with a total score of 38,932 points.

“What makes this award important is it just recognizes Sommer,” said Keith Wilson, the high school’s principal. “Sommer does not generally look out for herself.”

Friends, teachers and relatives emphasize that Sommer’s gifts extend far beyond her 4.0 grade-point average and her zest for knowledge. She is a young woman, they say, who pours her energies into bettering the world around her.

“She not only sees with her brain, but she sees with her heart,” said Dennis Dado, who teaches the school’s student government class. “She loves life and lets people know it, and that love of life is infectious.”

Sommer, who is a year younger than most seniors because she skipped kindergarten, serves on the Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, tutors in math and science, and is student body secretary. In the past, she’s performed in school plays.

“I do think I do a lot,” she said, “but I do it because there’s so many things I’m interested in. There’s so many opportunities out there, and I feel like if I don’t do them, I’m missing something.”

Sommer comes from a large family that also includes brothers Christopher, 22, and Eric, 20, and sister Nicole, 14.

Like his daughter, Sommer’s father, Larry, juggles a multitude of responsibilities. In addition to selling life insurance, he works as a management consultant, and teaches business courses through Glendale College and independently. He has a degree in electrical engineering. Her mother, Carole, is a mortgage broker in Thousand Oaks.

Teachers and city officials who have worked with Sommer on the youth commission say they are struck by her interest in her community.

Once a month, for instance, the school’s department heads, principal and other administrators meet as the school’s “leadership council.” Wilson had asked Dado if members of the student council would sit in on each session, just to get a sense of what is going on.

“Sommer volunteered for the first time and then chose to sit in regularly,” Dado said. “She wants to be part of the regular decision-making process.”

Wilson said the “talented, intense” high school senior has proved herself a valuable addition to the committee.

“Teachers listen to what she has to say,” he said. “She doesn’t sit there like a wallflower, waiting for something to happen.”

When 17-year-old Patrick Rayner is asked to describe his friend, he skips right by issues of talent and maturity.

“She’s crazy,” he said. “She goes out of her way to do things that are different, or even stupid. Like sometimes, she’ll wear different-colored socks and put stickers on her face.”

Sommer agrees that she likes to stand out. “I don’t think I should do something just because everyone else does it that way,” she said. “I like to do things that are crazy sometimes, just to get attention.”

Rearing this daughter, Carole Gentry said, has at times been “a lot of work.” Dedicated to certain environmental principles, Sommer insists that her mother avoid taking bags from stores, instead carrying items out in order to save paper. “At the supermarket, though, I win,” Carole Gentry said.

Gentry remembers going with Sommer, then 5, on daily trips to the library, only to have her finish by dinner time the dozen or so books they brought home.

And still today, “she’s unusual for her age,” said Carol Williams, who coordinates the Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, of which Sommer is one of 13 appointed teen-age members. “She approaches things in a very organized manner and has a very good sense of what it takes to get the job done.”

The key, Sommer said, is “I just don’t sleep very much.” Sommer said she divides her day up into “little blocks of time,” and whenever a block is vacant, she opens a book and starts studying.

Her mother, though, said she’s more intense than that. Often, Carole Gentry said, she slips her daughter’s textbooks out from under her chin after she’s fallen asleep over them. Some days, she said, she orders Sommer to go to the mall just to get her away from her studies.

Sommer, who tested at high school reading level in the first grade, remains a voracious reader and dreams of going into academics so that she can mesh her childhood passion with a profession.

She has applied for early admission to Yale University, but said she will go to a UC campus if she cannot collect enough scholarship money to make the private university affordable.

Although some of her favorite subjects are math and the physical sciences, she is considering entering a social science or humanities field.

“If I were a college professor,” she said, “I’d be learning all the time.”