The Virgin Islands Department of Education announced that a team of middle school students from All Saints Cathedral School, Antilles School, and Good Hope Country Day have won the State MATHCOUNTS Competition, held in St. Thomas on March 24th. The event was the first local MATHCOUNTS competition since the pandemic began. The top four individuals, Naitik Jhanwar from All Saints, Sanjiv Bachan and Meher Makhijani from Antilles, and Tristan Samuel from Good Hope Country Day, will represent the Virgin Islands in the 2023 Raytheon Technologies MATHCOUNTS National Competition in Orlando, Florida on May 13-16. The team will be accompanied by their coach, Sara Dykstra from Good Hope Country Day.

The competition is aimed at students in grades 6 to 8 and is designed to enhance their problem-solving skills and build confidence in mathematics. More than 100,000 students across the United States participate in the MATHCOUNTS Competition Series each year. MATHCOUNTS is one of the critical programs that help prepare students for future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

The local MATHCOUNTS competition was sponsored by the Rotary Club of St. Thomas II, and the Virgin Islands Math Coordinators, Juanita Boneque and Avon Benjamin, organized it. Benjamin, the state MATHCOUNTS coordinator, was pleased with the performance of the students and praised the two youngest participants, Dorian Euzebe and Makayla Griffith, both sixth-graders from Ricardo Richards Elementary School.

Jennifer Cannon, the coach of the All Saints team, and Sara Dykstra, the coach of the Good Hope Country Day team, expressed their satisfaction with the performance of their students, emphasizing the hard work and effort they put into the competition. The competition was an opportunity for students from different schools to come together and interact, which Benjamin said was one of the highlights of the event.

MATHCOUNTS is sponsored nationally by Raytheon Technologies, the U.S. Department of Defense STEM, the Northrop Grumman Foundation, the National Society of Professional Engineers, 3Mgives, Texas Instruments Incorporated, and the Art of Problem Solving. The National Society of Professional Engineers, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and CNA Insurance founded MATHCOUNTS.