Chess championship

The 2018 National Elementary (K-6) Championship will be May 11-13 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn. Nearly 2,000 kids were registered for the event as of Wednesday, according to Ryan Billingsley, Lincoln Middle School’s chess teacher. about the game. She has improved by paying more attention to how she positions her pieces.

“I started looking at the board more and analyzing a bit more,” she said.

Kaleb Roy, 12, is one of the many Lincoln Middle students who have learned chess from Billingsley. He said he has improved a lot since he started playing two years ago.

“It’s pretty competitive,” Kaleb said. “Also, the trips are pretty fun, too. And I like hanging out with all my friends.”

This week’s trip to Nashville is free for the 17 students. It’s all paid for with donations and grants, Billingsley said.

“We never charge the kids anything. We never ask the parents for anything,” he said.

The chess club has been funded the last three years by donations and grants. Every dollar goes back to the kids in some way, paying for tournament travel costs, T-shirts and chess supplies. Donations also paid for the school to give each fourth-grader a chess set this year, something the school plans to continue doing for future fourth-graders, Billingsley said.

Grant money flows through the Wolfpack Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up to help the district, especially with extracurricular activities. The majority of the money for chess has come from a source that wishes to remain anonymous, Billingsley said.

The school’s seventh-graders are too old to compete in the upcoming national championship, so Billingsley got them into a tournament in Orlando in December.

Mary Ann Spears, the district’s superintendent, said Billingsley has provided opportunities for students to learn chess and travel to tournaments, experiences many of the students wouldn’t otherwise have had, she said.

Seventy percent of the district’s 1,200 students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, a measure of poverty in school districts. The rate for all of Arkansas is about 63 percent.

“I love the chess program,” Spears said. “We’re always looking for anything else like that to engage the kids.”