The 32nd Orlando Saa Foreign Language Poetry Recitation Contest was held on Thursday, May 14, 2015 at William Paterson University. This contest offers middle and high school students the opportunity to recite poetry in the language they represented.
Forty-eight schools came from North and Central New Jersey. In the past years, there were over 900 participants, but this year there were only 700 participants. Nine languages are represented Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Spanish, and ESL. There are four levels, beginner, intermediate, advanced, and native. Trophies are given to winning students in first, second, and third place. Fourth place winners get a medal for honorable mention.
Eight BHS students participated: Holly Lippman in intermediate Spanish, Kiersten Campbell in Advanced French, Nicolas Re in beginner French, Liza Beckerman in native French, Amirah James in beginner Latin, Jinoo Song in Native Korean and Christina Bergeman in Intermediate Latin. Three of the students from BHS won in their category. Amirah James came in third place, Jinoo Song came in second place and Christina Bergeman received an honorable mention.
Ms. Violillo, who has chaperoned the event for the last four years, said that she is very proud of the students who participated, “They were all all winners, even though not all of them won.”
BHS has been participating for nearly 15 years, and, this year, the representative group was smaller than in the past. Ms. Violillo said, “They did well for a small group”.
Many of the world language teachers helped prepare the students for this contest. The contestants only had seven weeks to get ready due to testing and weather. The French teachers, Mrs. Whittle and Mrs. Vassil, helped their students get ready. Mrs. Maxwell help the students in Latin. All of the other language teachers helped prepare in many different ways.
