The Spanish club boarded the buses to the World Language Competition held at Slippery Rock University October 8.

¡Venga ya!

No, seriously. This is an annual language competition that the university hosts open to schools in Western PA.

The competition only costs $12 per school district, and since Beaver Area Spanish teacher Mr. Jason Hank puts this competition fee in his foreign language budget for the school year, the Spanish program is able to attend every year as long as it gets approved by the district.

“One of the reasons I like to take the kids [to the competition] is because I’m proud—we have a very strong program that is able to compete at high levels,” said Mr. Hank.

For Slippery Rock, the university students are on fall break, so the campus is mostly closed which gives the university a day to host an event.

Although most of the college students aren’t on campus that week, some of the foreign language students stay to help run the competition. Different language clubs from the university such as Arabic, Japanese, and French were there with activities for the competitors to work on as they waited.

Not only is the event a good way to get high schoolers on a college campus, but it also is good advertisement for Slippery Rock. They have hosted the competition since the late 90s and early 2000s. (Although they have had a few hiatuses over the years due to staff changes and scheduling conflicts.)

Schools from Mercer, Butler, Crawford, and Beaver Counties participated in this event. Two familiar schools, Blackhawk and Riverside, attended with Beaver Area to represent Beaver County.

All together 522 kids attended from 32 schools. However, not all of them competed in Spanish; some participated in French and Japanese, but the majority competed in the Spanish category.

Beaver Area has been successful going to the competition the past two years, and this year sophomore Vivian Gedman took home first place by getting a perfect score on the Spanish test.

“I was very shocked when I won; I tried my best and had fun,” said Gedman.

Sophomore Molly O’Neill attended the competition and only missed three questions, yet she didn’t place. Most of the competitors who earned second place in their categories only missed one or two questions, but the tie breaker was the amount of time students needed to complete the test.

The event takes a whole school day considering the fact the test itself takes an hour, transportation to and from Slippery Rock is an hour each way, plus there are other activities while on campus.

“I really like Spanish, but I’m not a very competitive person. The competition still was fun because even if you don’t do well on the test it’s a cool environment to be in,” shared junior Owen Bowders.

Didn’t get to go this year? Fear not—Beaver Area plans to attend next year’s event.