Throughout the year, Western Dubuque students have competed in the Great Plains Math League competitions around the state. At each competition, students had a chance to qualify for the State Championship. Western Dubuque had two students qualify for the State Math Championship. Junior Cameron Coles and freshman David Roth earned state qualifying scores. It is worthy to note that these competitions challenge even the most gifted seniors. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for a freshman to qualify for State. But, throughout the year David earned multiple qualifying scores. David is the first Western Dubuque student to qualify multiple times for the State event. The GPML State Championship was held at Iowa City West on April 22. Western Dubuque competed for awards in the small school division. Awards were given by grade level for each individual test and to the top team in the team tests. Due to a conflict, Cameron Coles was not able to attend, but Kaelan Lloyd proved he was a worthy replacement by receiving first place sophomore in the Sprint event. David Roth topped him by receiving first place freshmen awards in both the Target and Sprint events. Since Western Dubuque only had two students qualify for State, they were at a disadvantage for the three and six person team tests, but did manage to place well overall given the high individual scores.
Unfortunately, placing first in the small schools division is not enough to qualify students for the National Math Championship. Small school students compete together with large school students for the National Math Championship. In order to qualify, a student needs to score at least 50% of the available points on any test or higher than 80% of the participants in their grade at the State Championship. Both David Roth and Kaelan Lloyd had outstanding individual scores that qualified them to continue on to the National Math Championship in May. In total, only 3 small school students from Iowa were able to qualify for the National Math Championship.
David and Kaelan are looking forward to the challenges at the National Math Championship and hope to receive more awards in May.