Jeffrey Brown:
Throughout the year, students met with advisers and honed their skills, then competed in local and state contests before these national finals, where the competition and energy was most intense,as finalists gathered with their families and practiced their lines, and judges scored the displays, all following in the footsteps of thousands of previous competitors over the past half-century, including alumni such as current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composer Caroline Shaw.
High school sophomores Emma Hua Josephine Calzada, And Chloe Crable from Needham, Massachusetts, produced a documentary on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.