Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Chess plays big part in culture
17 Lincoln Middle School students to compete in national competition
LINCOLN — A courtyard behind the main building at Lincoln Middle School features an oversized chess board big enough to walk on. Six tables each have a chess board attached. The sidewalk sports several painted, black-and-white chess playing surfaces.
Five trophies in the trophy case — three from national and two from state chess competitions — indicate what a force the school has become in the scholastic chess world.
Chess is “very much a part of what we are,” said Stan Karber, assistant principal.
Lincoln Middle School is home to about 380 students in grades four through seven. Seventeen will travel to Nashville, Tenn., for next weekend’s National Elementary Championship, a chess competition for grades kindergarten through six.
The school won the national championship two years ago in the unrated division, which is for teams competing for the first time in a national chess tournament. Symphony Richards, a Lincoln Middle sixth-grader, was part of that team. She will be participating in the national event for the third time this weekend.
“It’s an amazing opportunity. It’s a learning experience,” said Symphony, 12. “I just think, if I keep going, I’m going to keep getting better. And the better I get, the farther chess can take me.”
Lincoln Middle and Don Roberts Elementary School in Little Rock are the only two Arkansas schools attending the national competition. Lincoln Middle finished first and Don Roberts finished second in the K-8 division of the Scholastic State Chess Championship on April 21 at the Tyson School of Innovation in Springdale.
Ryan Billingsley, a math and science teacher, founded the school’s chess club four years ago. This school year he also began offering chess as a “choice class.”
Choice classes are offered during the last period of the day. They allow Lincoln Middle teachers to teach a subject of interest to them and are treated like any other class. About 60 students have taken his chess class this school year, Billingsley said.
Several studies have shown connections between playing chess and increased academic achievement, Billingsley said.
“It helps with focus, it helps with decision-making,” he said. “And it helps kids realize the consequences of their decisions. And we’ve had a lot of really amazing examples of that in our club.”
The school has seen improvements in its chess students both academically and behaviorally, Karber said.
“They are dedicated, they are disciplined,” Karber said. “They are a really tight-knit group. They share a great sense of pride that I think few programs can instill in kids.”
Symphony represented Arkansas at the U.S. Chess National Girls Tournament of Champions in Norfolk, Va., last summer at age 11. One girl from each state in grades kindergarten through 12 is invited to compete in that tournament. She also represented Arkansas at a girls invitational in St. Louis last summer.
Symphony said she likes “pretty much everything” 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.”