School board recognizes students for outstanding performances

Azle High School VASE, CyberStart and FFA students gathered to be recognized and shake hands with school board

Azle High School students were recognized for a variety of accomplishments at a Monday, May 15 school board meeting.

The Azle Visual Arts Scholastic Event (VASE) has made it to the last six state competitions that have been held. Azle High School student, Brooklyn Steward won a medal at the regional VASE competition, qualifying her for state. There were 71 entries at the regional and area competition. Brooklyn received the regional medal.

“[To put it into perspective] there were 32,000 entries at the state level and only 151 received fours” Azle art teacher Baryn Shepherd said.

Shepherd has since accepted the regional director position for region 11. Next year’s VASE competition will be held in Azle High School.

“That’s going to do a lot for our school and our district,” Shepherd said.

“We have three sponsors for our FFA chapter and this year all three of them had a team that qualified for state competition,” CTE Director Suzanne Murr said.

The three teams were vet science, entomology, and dairy cattle. The entomology team won their Area Contest. “Our Area consists of 114 schools,” teacher Elizabeth Slough said. “They placed in the top nine percent of entomology teams in the state of Texas. They were able to compete in an invitational National Contest at Tarleton State University and they placed seventh at the National Contest.”

The dairy cattle team had one individual place third at District and the vet science team placed in to top 11 percent at state.

Also recognized was Sherri Prather and the Azle CyberStart America competitors.

“This is our third year to compete in CyberStart America,” Prather said. “Our first year we qualified 17 people. Last year we qualified 32, this year we qualified 53. We finished first in the state of Texas and tenth in the nation.”

In addition to that, Azle High School has received a gold award as a cyber opportunity school.

Azle cybersecurity students put in tremendous work this year solving puzzles and problems relating to cybersecurity in this national competition.

“Everything we’ve done is because of them,” Prather said. “They are outstanding.”