Fourteen VHS Students Win Medals in Russian Olympiada

Fourteen Vineland High School students enrolled in the Russian program won medals at the recent Delaware Valley Russian Olympiada held at Temple University.

The VHS students were invited by the American Council of Teachers of Russian because of the active participation of Vineland High School in the National High School Slavic Honor Society.

Mrs. Vlada Jackson, Vineland High School’s Russian teacher, established the new chapter of this honor society in 2006.

Gold medal winners included Jekaterina Nebolsina, a junior, and Viktoriya Shcherbina, a sophomore.

Silver medal winners included senior Inna Kucher; juniors Alena Savchenko and Oksana Yarkovoy; sophomores Maciej Grudzien, Rashad Williams, and Vyacheslav Drozd; and freshman Diana Kucher.

Bronze medal winners were seniors Antonina Ternova and Michael Langley; and sophomores Ariel Drayton, Olga Shapovalov and Inna Nechay.

In all 97, high school students from Abington Heights, Philadelphia, Marlton, Kingston, and Vineland participated in the competition.

The event was divided into three levels: regular, heritage and native speaker. Each student was expected to perform a variety of tasks on the following topics: oral speech, civilization, poetry, reading comprehension and narrative storytelling. The students were judged by professors from Bryn Mawr College, Swarthmore College, Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The students prepared for the competition under the direction of Mrs. Jackson.

Certificates of mention were also given for participation.

“This competition afforded our students the opportunity to meet and compete against area students of the Russian language, to gain confidence in their ability to speak and to demonstrate their knowledge of Russian civilization and language,” said Ms. Jackson. “Our students also had an opportunity to tour the Temple University campus.”

Dr. Thomas McCann, VHS South principal and a Temple alumnus, held an informal ceremony at the school last week to recognize the performance of these students in a new area of competition.