Some 19 Odyssey of the Mind (OM) teams from across Delaware won state titles this year. Out of those 19, five teams came from the Indian River School District.
Coastal Point • Submitted:
Laura Walter puts on quite a show as the Odyssey of the Mind team from the Indian River School District performed in front of the school board in March.
This year’s showing by Indian River continued a trend, which since 2000 has brought 23 state championships to the district. In the past three years alone, Indian River students have won 14 OM Delaware championships and have even had tremendous success on the world level.
This year’s five Indian River state championship teams will be leaving next week to once again compete on the world level against about 60 teams at the world championships at the University of Iowa. After opening ceremonies on May 23, the competition will run three days, ending with an awards ceremony on Saturday.
Last year, the elementary school team, made up of fifth graders, eclipsed the district’s best mark of sixth place at worlds, which was set the year before, with a runner-up performance at the best-of-the-best competition.
Lisa Forney, who has been coaching OM teams in the district for about 15 years, coached both of those high-placing elementary-school teams.
“I give a lot of credit to the coaches,” said Susan Bunting, the district’s director of instruction, who oversees the program. “With Lisa Forney at the beginning, I do believe we’ve been able to build the program. She manages to get them so well oriented to the program.”
Before Bunting moved to the central office in the early 1990’s, the district’s OM program consisted of just the elementary-school team. Now, gifted and talented students from across the district compete on one seven-person elementary team, two seven-person middle-school teams and two seven-person high-school teams, all of which will represent Indian River this month in Iowa.
“It’s like a farm system for a baseball team,” Bunting said. “We give them a really firm foundation so they can move on and still have success.”
At the worlds next week, the Indian River teams will use the same long-term problem-solving performances that earned them titles at the state level, plus a spontaneous performance to a challenge provided by the judges on the spot.
Through their long-term performances, students must solve a problem. In the “jungle bloke” question, for instance, which three of the teams used, students must solve a problem using a bloke, a rainforest setting and different animals.
After researching the animals and the different types of rainforests, the fifth grade team came up with a scenario in which the bloke was looking for a lost treasure in the woods. The animals of the rainforest helped him find the treasure, and he, in turn, helped them with a growing noise problem by using bananas and nuts to make noise-mufflers.
All of the solutions must be created by the students and teams are penalized if judges sense any adult interaction, Bunting said. But Forney said that her fifth-grade students don’t usually need any help.
“I gather my team together and put all of the problems out in front of them. They vote on what they want to do. Then we do a lot of brainstorming,” she said. “They are some fantastic academic students.”
For the past several weeks, Forney, the coaches of the other teams and their students have been raising money to fund their trip to Iowa to compete in the worlds. Although they have raised more than $40,000, Bunting said that more is needed.
Call Bunting at (302) 436-1070, ext. 119, to donate to the teams, which will likely be a handful for the world competition next week, as they were at states.
“We’ve had very strong teams,” said Bunting, a former OM coach. “You’ll overhear someone saying, ‘I don’t want to compete against an Indian River team.’”