Dorinda White, Principal at Rainbow Elementary School, congratulates Math Team students after a competition in 2016. CONTRIBUTED

MADISON – Members of the Math Team at Rainbow Elementary School sacrificed a sleep-in Saturday to compete at the Hayden Math Competition on Feb. 4.

More than half of the Rainbow Math Team attended the contest at Hayden Middle School in Blount County.  

Rainbow’s sixth-grade team won third place. Earning individual awards for sixth grade were Ethan Kueck, fourth place, and Sophia Fedoseyev, seventh place.

The fifth-grade team from Rainbow earned bragging rights by capturing first place in the competition. Students who won individual awards were Natalie Nguyen, first place; Amy Park, fourth place; Rachael Ehrman, seventh place; and Meredith Drummond, ninth place.

In addition, seven of Rainbow’s sixth-graders competed at the Chapter MathCounts competition, which is a national middle school competition in which only sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are allowed to compete.

In MathCounts, all of the students compete against each other, regardless of grade. The students are tested on eighth-grade level material.

Rainbow students competing in MathCounts were Elaine Bao, David Parker, Ashwin Prabhakar, Ryan Shurtz, Alex Stern, Constance Wang and Jonathan Yang. Their teachers commended these students for applying lots of extra time to prepare for this competition.

The Rainbow team placed seventh out of 13 teams. Rainbow students competed primarily against older students in middle schools.

In addition, Ashwin Prabhakar finished individually in seventh place, along with qualifying to advance to the state-level competition of MathCounts. In the four years that Rainbow Elementary has been competing at MathCounts, this year’s contest was the first time that a Rainbow student achieved the honor of advancing to state competition.

From Mill Creek Elementary School, the team with Jason Davies, Pranav Somu, Joshua Wang and Jerry Zheng reached third place at MathCounts district-level competition. This team will now advance to compete at state competition in Birmingham.

Also from Mill Creek and advancing to the state contest, Jerry Zheng placed first in the district and Joshua Wang earned second place.