Juneau-Douglas students win over 15 awards in academic decathlon

The 13 Juneau-Douglas High School students who competed in the 2017 Alaska Academic Decathlon, Tasha Elizarde, bottom right.
The 13 Juneau-Douglas High School students who competed in the 2017 Alaska Academic Decathlon in Anchorage on Friday including Tasha Elizarde, bottom right. (Photo courtesy Karina Reyes)

Juneau-Douglas High School walked away from the Alaska Academic Decathlon in Anchorage with multiple awards Saturday including two team awards – one for highest improved aggregate score for the Large Schools Division and a bronze medal in the Team Super Quiz Competition.

Juneau-Douglas Librarian and Academic Decathlon Adviser Karina Reyes said the four-day decathlon is a statewide competition that turns students into “Renaissance people.”

“They learn how to do interviews, speeches, write essays, they study history, literature, art, music, economics, science and social studies,” Reyes said. “And all of those are under a banner of a larger theme for the year and this year’s theme was World War II.”

Reyes added that the focus wasn’t just on how the war was fought. The students also studied the art and music produced during that period, they learned about the era’s important literary figures and they studied the economic issues of the day.

This year’s competition was Tasha Elizarde’s third time competing in the academic decathlon. She’s a senior at Juneau-Douglas and said the competition is so intense the decathletes started studying right after the competition’s theme was announced last April, almost a year before the decathlon.

“We study every Saturday for about three to four hours and then outside of that, we study on our own,” Elizarde said. “Like I said earlier, we have this 4-inch binder of study materials, and we just read them through day, night, like whenever we can find time to do that.”

Elizarde said a lot of people are intimidated by the decathlon, but she thinks it’s actually really fun. She said the decathlon gave her a community where she felt safe to learn, fail and discover her own interests. She highly recommends it.

The JDHS academic decathlon teams pose with their medals.
The JDHS academic decathlon teams pose with their medals on Saturday. (Photo courtesy Karina Reyes)

Thirteen students made two teams to represent Juneau-Douglas at the decathlon. They won 15 individual medals and several other honors. They competed against more than 130 students from 11 other high schools.

Tasha Elizarde is one of the students who placed. She won a gold medal in literature and a bronze medal in art.

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