Six students from Newton High School and ten from the PCM School District went to the Iowa High School Speech Association’s Southeast Iowa Individual State Speech Contest at Vinton-Shellsburg High School this past Saturday.

Two Newton High School students earned a unanimous 1 rating for their performances. They were the Solo Musical Theatre entries of Ben Magana (“If I Only Had a Brain”), and Miles Soppe’s (“So Anyway”). Three other students received an overall 1 rating. Those performances were from Mathias Bloom in After Dinner Speaking (“The Road to Success”),  Michael Ferrari’s solo improvisation (about a talk show host and a podcast host lost in a waterpark) and Hannah Templeman in Acting {“Normalcy”). Templeman also was awarded an overall 2 rating for her Review (“Breathe”), as was Astrid Fairbairn for her handwritten prose piece (“The Closed System Analogy”).

The ten PCM students, who had fifteen entries in eleven different performance categories, earned the following ratings: Faith Buckley-Bonham – overall 2 rating in Literature Program, Jocelyn Burg – overall 1 ratings in Acting and Musical Theatre, Carter Dudley – unanimous 1 ratings in Literature Program and Solo Musical Theatre, Rylan Edgington – unanimous 2 rating in Radio News Announcing, Brighton Ingle – overall 2 rating in Prose and an overall 1 rating in Poetry, Caleb Ingle – overall 2 rating in Solo Improvisation, London Ludwick – unanimous 1 rating in Acting, Keira Stone – overall 2 rating in After Dinner Speaking and a unanimous 1 rating in Storytelling, Gavin VanDonselaar – overall 1 rating in Radio News Announcing,  Ian Vriezelaar – unanimous 2 ratings in Solo Improvisation and Spontaneous Speaking.