Teen ready to shine in Academic Decathlon
Carlos Garcia was born with normal eyesight, though he has no memory of experiencing light or any visual sensation. When he was 6 months old, retinoblastoma took the vision from one eye. The cancer spread to his other eye at age 2. He was fitted with prosthetic eyes and has been 100% blind ever since.
Whatever. That’s what the 17-yearold would say about it.
“I don’t really see it as a handicap anymore,” he told me. “As I got older, I realized there are different workaLike rounds to everything. I work as well as any of my peers, at anything.”
And that includes the demanding competition of the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon. Carlos, a junior, is a member of the nine-person team at Milwaukee Public Schools’ Rufus King International High School.
On Friday, the team goes up against 49 other schools in regional competition at five host sites across the state. Then, 20 schools will advance to state in March, and then in April to the U.S. Academic Decathlon nationals, which this year are in Madison.
Carlos is the first blind decathlete in Wisconsin’s program, and the second nationwide, according to state director Molly Ritchie.
the other competitors, Carlos must complete seven written tests with a theme of World War II. All of the questions have been converted to Braille for him by Audio & Braille Literacy Enhancement, or ABLE, which is located at Milwaukee’s downtown library and provides alternative versions of textbooks, magazines, tax forms, restaurant menus and other materials.
ABLE Executive Director Cheryl Orgas said her organization has handled the test questions with the utmost in confidentiality so no team or student gets an advantage.
“We’ve been preparing them in a very short turnaround time so he
actually can take these tests along with his sighted peers. It really gives him a level playing field,” she said.
Because Braille takes longer to read than print, Carlos receives extra time to complete the tests, which cover art, economics, literature, math, music, science and social studies. He feels for the correct multiple-choice answer and circles it. The competition also requires competitors to give two speeches, answer questions in an interview and write an essay.
Other members of the Rufus King team are Brendan O’Brien, Simone Wright, Jacob Huebner, Andre Quarino, Haja Goggans, Chandler Hardin, Lee Johnston and Zari Ellzey. The coaches are Edwin Raymond and Tania Miennert.
I interviewed Carlos at his home on Milwaukee’s near south side. His parents, Leon and Serinia, both Mexican immigrants who run an ice cream shop in the neighborhood, told me, with Carlos’ help translating, how proud they are of their son. Carlos was born in Milwaukee. He has an older sister, Miriam.
Carlos has a 3.8 grade-point average and is also on the wrestling team and a mentor to freshmen. He hopes to attend college in California and major in economics and math.
He walks with a cane, which is fine now but was a pain when he was younger and the other kids kept asking why he had a stick. He hopes to transition as an adult to a service dog.
His vision teacher at King, Lauren Rosenbergh, spends an hour a day working with Carlos on technology and Braille. She has never met anyone more focused on achieving his goals.
“He’s in the National Honor Society. He’s just such a smart guy and a real gem. I feel honored to be able to teach someone like him,” she said.
I watched his fingers glide across Braille economics study materials for the decathlon, including graphs showing long run and short run aggregate supply curves. He read aloud what his fingers detected from the raised dots: “The SRAS curve also becomes vertical once the full employment level is reached. This is because the quantity of goods and services produced can’t be increased regardless of how much aggregate demand or the price level increases.”
Carlos also uses an electronic device that has one line of Braille that keeps refreshing with each new sentence. And he showed me how his iPhone reads texts, websites and everything else aloud to him. He has become so skilled at consuming information that way that he has it set at a speed that sounded like gibberish to me.
Although confident about his team’s chances in the decathlon, Carlos admits to concerns about the science test, which involves quantum physics. “A lot of the other kids are in physics, but I’m not, so I have to kind of teach myself about that, too,” he said. “But you know I’ll get through it.”
Academic Decathlon isn’t as sexy as, say, being on the basketball team, but that’s all right.
“There’s not much celebrity attached to it. It’s more about doing well. We congratulate each other. But among the rest of the school community, they’re kind of oblivious that this even exists,” he said.
That’s too bad. Even a sighted person should be able to see that Carlos Garcia’s pursuit of knowledge and excellence is something worth cheering about.