Students Achieve Perfect Scores at Lahey Elementary School

 Fourth and fifth-grade students in the English Language Arts LEAP (Lahey Enrichment Academic Program) and SAIL (Spotlighting Abilities of Inquisitive Learners) programs at Thomas J. Lahey Elementary School in the Harborfields Central School District have much to be proud of. Six of the students who took part in the WordMasters Challenge, a national competition geared toward promoting growth in the areas of vocabulary and verbal reasoning, achieved perfect scores. 

 Three times a year, students participate in the WordMasters “meets,” where they are provided with challenging vocabulary lists and must use a variety of resources to determine word meanings and usage. Students are required to solve twenty analogies based on relationships among words they have learned.

As of the first two meets of the year, TJL proudly boasts six perfect scores. The first meet resulted in a perfect score from fourth grader Craig Goropeuschek. Out of 36,000-plus fourth graders in the country who took part in the first WordMasters Challenge meet, only 62 students, including Craig, attained perfect scores.

During the second meet of the year, five students from the fifth grade also earned perfect scores. Those students were Kelsey Fowle, Meegan Galante, Katie Kennedy, Daniel Stein and Albert Zhang. Over 37,000 fifth graders across the nation participated in that challenge, and only 145 of them achieved perfect scores. The Harborfields Central School District is proud of the accomplishments of these six hardworking students. 

Photo :Thomas J. Lahey Elementary School students who achieved perfect scores on the WordMasters Challenge (left to right) Kelsey Fowle, Daniel Stein, Craig Goropeuschek, Meegan Galante and Albert Zhang, with TJL Gifted and Talented teacher Christine Mayr. (Absent from photo: Katie Kennedy.)

Story & photo by Alison DeMaria