Four Lake Region High School seniors recently captured fifth place in WorldQuest, a national academic competition held by a prominent global issues education organization known as the World Affairs Council of America.

The competition was held on Saturday, April 26, at the Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center in Washington, D.C. While the winners, a team from Plano West Senior High School of Plano, Texas, answered 93 of the 99 questions correctly, the Lake Region team answered 89 of 99 questions correctly.

The questions were divided into 10 categories: Cybersecurity, U.S. energy policy, global economic realignment, the Middle East, global environmental issues, U.S. education, the United Nations Millennium Goal 1, geography, global health, and current events.

Last year, the Lake Region High School team came in 22nd place at the national competition. Mackenzie McHatton, a senior who participated in both national competitions, said that the team’s improved placement this year reflected their accumulated experience.

“It seemed easier to us this year because we were so much better prepared,” McHatton said. “Two of us on the team had done it last year so we’d already known what to expect. The nerves weren’t there anymore.”

Each team member specialized in several of the categories. While McHatton focused on U.S. economic competitiveness and the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis last year, this year she focused on education and global economic realignment. The other three members of the team were Even Logan, Estelle Lohm and Amina Meziani, who competed in last year’s national competition, as well.

To Scott Nye, a Lake Region High School social studies teacher and the primary coach for the WorldQuest team, the fifth place showing is a huge accomplishment. Most of the competing schools, Nye said, were private. All of them, including the Lake Region team, won the World Affairs Council academic competitions in their home states.

“We basically went up against 47 state champion schools and virtually all of those schools were exclusive private schools,” Nye said. “The school that beat us by one, Georgetown High School, accepts only 40 percent of those people that applied to it. The one that won was Plano West Senior High School, and when I looked that up, one of the things I found was a real estate agent advertising houses for sale where the children could go to Plano West high school.”

“I think the community is not publicizing this enough to their advantage, that their public high school beat the best high schools in the country – that only four of the high schools in the country beat us,” Nye added. “West Plano is like the Hollywood of Texas.”

The four seniors, along with eight other Lake Region High School students, have been preparing for the competition all year in Nye’s WorldQuest class. The students have spent much of the year scrutinizing a three-and-a-half foot, double-sided World Affairs Council study guide, chock full of government reports and white papers on income inequality, other economic indicators, and statistics on recoverable national energy reserves and new energy extraction technologies, among a variety of topics.

“I can’t think of a better class to prepare them for college,” Nye said. “It’s teaching them how to read really fact-rich, difficult stuff where it isn’t handed to them on a plate like most textbooks. It’s at an advanced college level that they have to learn to study.”

McHatton, who will attend the University of Southern Maine for pre-med next year, said she loves learning about national and international affairs.

“I think it actually is the best experience I’ve had in high school in terms of preparing me for college,” she said. “WorldQuest gave me the experience to study extremely large amounts of material at a high reading level.”

When asked what she thinks about the international scene these days, McHatton mentioned the crisis in Ukraine.

“I personally think it’s a little sketchy,” she said.

The World Affairs Council was formed in 1918 by associates of President Woodrow Wilson concerned about a growing drift toward isolationism following World War I.

The council is sponsored in part by the oil company BP, the 1918 Society Members, Carlson & the Carlson Family Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chevron, The Claremont Group, Coca-Cola, Delegation of the European Union to the United States.

Lake Region High School’s WorldQuest Team, which recently placed fifth at the National World Affairs Council WorldQuest competition in Washington, D.C., tours Arlington National Cemetery.