Students Have Face-Off Down to a Science

You could tell the students were nervous at the start of the science competition Wednesday between 112th Street Elementary School in Watts and Wilder’s Preparatory Academy in Inglewood.

“Name the two kinds of organisms on Earth,” one fourth-grader from 112th was asked.

“Animals and plants,” the student answered correctly.

“Which one are you?”

“I am a plant.”

After those early jitters, the level of competition picked up and fourth- and fifth-graders from the two schools competed fiercely to demonstrate their knowledge of natural science.

Science teacher Stan White, backed by Principal Brenda Manuel, has helped create a passion for science at 112th Street, a school attempting to overcome a legacy of academic failure.

Wednesday was the first day of a two-part competition that will end at Wilder’s Prep on June 6. Wilder’s is a predominantly African American charter school with a reputation for academic excellence. On the statewide Academic Performance Index, which rates schools from 1 to 10, it scores an 8, compared to a 1 for 112th Street.

At the end of Wednesday’s “Jeopardy”-style match, the fourth-graders from 112th Street trailed their peers at Wilder’s Prep by a narrow 501 points to 495. Among fifth-graders, 112th Street’s students were ahead by 383 to 356. Most answers were worth from one to 20 points.

The match -- held in the 112th Street campus auditorium -- had the atmosphere of a high-stakes basketball game, with deafening cheers following crucial points. Parents and teachers leaped to their feet after some answers, punching the air and high-fiving neighbors.

One high point came when fourth-graders from both schools received perfect scores of 350 points each for correctly drawing and labeling diagrams of the body parts of insects and arachnids.

“That has never happened before,” said an amazed White, who has been conducting science competitions in schools for more than three decades.

In another impressive run, fifth-grader Daisy Bejarano from 112th Street correctly answered consecutive, 10-point questions about the three kinds of blood vessels (arteries, veins and capillaries), the structures that protect the heart (the rib cage) and the brain (the skull), the names of the four chambers of the heart (left and right ventricles and left and right atria), and, finally, the part of the body “that prepares food for full digestion” (the stomach).

“I’m glad I did it for my team, and I’m proud of my teammates,” Daisy said afterward. She said she had spent at least an hour a day for the last several weeks studying for the competition.

Sharon Curry, a Los Angeles Unified School District assistant superintendent, told students, teachers and parents that it was “wonderful to be able to showcase success -- academic success -- in a community that is not always recognized for its good things.”

“This proves,” she added, “that with hard work, with the right leadership and the right teachers, anything can happen.”