For another year, Antilles School’s mathletes took the award for top team at the St. Thomas-St. John District Mathcounts competition, but the V.I. Montessori School and Peter Gruber International Academy came in a close second.
All four members of the top team will advance to the territorial competition next month, along with the top six individual mathletes. Joining Antilles’ Amisha Mirchandani, Divyesh Gurnani, Viren Punjabi, Mohit Mirpuri, Rhea Rhupani, Tanya Mirchandani, Kashish Chainani, Azad Daswani and Milan Sakhrani on the district team will be VIMSIA’s Skyler Anspatcher, who placed third overall in the individual competition.
Addelita Cancryn Junior High School and Bertha C. Boschulte Middle School also fielded teams during this year’s district competition, which is sponsored by the St. Thomas Club of Rotary II.
Coaching the St. Thomas-St. John team for another year will be Antilles math teacher Michele Humphries, who usually also takes the territory’s team on to nationals in Washington, D.C.
“I’m really happy that all the top 10 students from all the schools get to go,” Humphries said after the winners were announced. “And I can’t wait to coach all 10 of them going into the territorial competition. Now we’ll definitely be continuing soon with our Saturday practices, with lots of pizza and lots and lots of math problems – harder ones this time – in preparation.”
Each year the competition has students working individually and in teams to puzzle out complicated problems in algebra, probability, statistics and geometry. This year, like most others, the students quickly outpaced their parents and friends in the audience and worked hard to best one another, sometimes not even letting the announcer finish reading the question before buzzing in with the answer.
St. Croix’s district competition will be held Friday.