By SARAH LOW

Sixteen Vashon students representing The Harbor School, McMurray Middle School and Vashon High School took high honors at a statewide math competition this month.

The island students competed in the Math is Cool Masters competition in Moses Lake on Saturday, Dec. 7, and teams took first place in both the seventh-grade and ninth- and 10th-grade divisions.

“It was good to see Vashon prove itself,” said John Kehl, a member of the winning team from VHS.

Math is Cool is a state math competition for public and private schools where students compete in both team and individual contests.

Vashon students’ performance at a regional competition in Seattle last month qualified four teams for the Masters event: seventh-graders from McMurray, eighth- graders from the Harbor School and McMurray and ninth- and 10th-graders from VHS. According to the rules of the competition, the four highest scoring students from each school make up the teams that move on to the Masters event.

The participating schools are placed in one of three divisions ­— Elite, Division 1 and Division 2 ­— according to school enrollment size and regional performance scores, in order to keep the competition as fair as possible. Division 1 includes the larger schools, Division 2 the smaller ones, and the Elite group is composed of the eight highest scoring teams from the regional competitions, regardless of division.

The eighth-grade team from the Harbor School, which normally competes in Division 2, was placed in the Elite group after a strong performance at regionals.

Nathan Enzian, coach of the Harbor School team, noted that the team placed second in Division 2 last year and had hoped to win that division this year, but then was bumped up to Elite.

“We qualified as the eighth team out of eight, and I thought we had a chance to maybe catch the sixth-place team,” he said.

This is exactly what they did, placing sixth out of the eight Elite teams.

The Harbor School team included students Nick Spranger, Jacob Gold, Kieran Enzian and Stuart Kraabel.

All of the other Vashon teams competed in Division 2. Following a strong performance at regionals, the McMurray seventh-grade team of Sarah Hotchkiss, Jacob White, Lars Cain and James Houston placed first out of 12 teams. The eighth- grade team of Sasha Elenko, Adri Yarkin, Miles Schoenberg and Ryan Weller placed fourth out of 12 at the Masters event.

The high school team, with John Kehl, Alden Rogers, Aryeh Stahl and Selena Mildon, was the first team from VHS to participate in many years.

Melissa Kehl, a VHS science teacher and the mother of a team member, said that there was interest this year from kids who’d been participating at the elementary and middle school levels and wanted to continue. She coordinated and managed the team, but said the kids coached themselves.

“The degree of math involved here is beyond me,” Kehl said with a laugh. “All of the credit goes to the kids and their math teachers.”

The team placed first out of nine teams in the overall Division 2 competition, and team member Kehl placed second overall in the individual geometry event.

“I think that the best part was discovering that our little school on the island was so high in the standings with all of these other schools,” he said.