County students recognized for championships
Gordon County Schools honored students during its April Board of Education meeting who had won at the state and/or national level in their respective school-sponsored competitive events.
The first group to be honored was Belwood Elementary School’s state championship reading bowl team. On March 25, these students made school history by being named the Georgia reading bowl champions. This competition is conducted annually by the Georgia Tome Student Literacy Society. This is the second consecutive year that students from Belwood have ended the regular season ranked in the top four. The team’s journey began in September. For this year’s competition, students were required to read and become experts on seven books. Each book contained around 300 pages of text.
Team members included Maddie Anglin, Skylin Manis, Cece Kolterman, Jenna Baker, Calvin Kellogg, and Caroline Soesbe and coaches Ramona Burnett, Shelby Johnson.
Career, Technical, and Agriculture Education students were also recognized for their respective accomplishments in competitive Career and Technical Student Organization events. In FFA, Kylie Hurd, a freshman at Sonoraville High School was recognized as both the state and national FFA Agriscience Fair Contest winner in the Animal Systems category. As an eighth grader when she won the state level competition, Kylie was coached by Red Bud Middle School FFA advisor Rebecca
Macedo and attended and won the national competition as a student at Sonoraville High School whose FFA advisor is Josh Boydston.
In the area of FCCLA, Marcus Phillips, Jayra Stansell, and Hannah Yun were recognized as recipients of the State Gold Medal in Chapter Service Project and all will be advancing to national competition this summer. These students are all students at Sonoraville High School and were coached by FCCLA sponsor, Lori Holland.
And in competition in Skills USA was Cody McNeese who was recently named the Skills USA State Champion in Electrical Construction Wiring. Cody is a senior at Gordon Central High School and was coached by Skills USA advisor, Bo Dooley.