SBCSS News and Press Releases

Upland, Summit Students Advance To National History Day Competition

2008-06-17

SAN BERNARDINO - Students from Upland High School have quite a legacy in advancing to the National History Day competition annually in College Park, Md.

Since 1992, Upland High has sent representatives to the national event. Even by those consistent standards, this year the school is making, um, history.

For the first time, Upland will send three projects to the national event, which will be held June 15-19 at the University of Maryland. All totaled, San Bernardino County will be represented with four different projects, as Summit High School from Fontana Unified School District also has a national qualifier.

"We've never had a year like this," said Dan Hynes, a history and economics teacher at Upland. He and fellow history teacher Marilyn Lubarsky have coached History Day students for the past two decades.

Upland not only had three national qualifiers this year from the California competition, but three others were selected as alternates.

"The students did an excellent job with the projects. It's an honor just to go to the state competition, and to do that well in California was a tremendous accomplishment," Hynes said.

The trio of Upland projects that qualified, included one from Caitlyn Hynes, Dan Hynes' daughter. "This is her second trip to nationals," Dan Hynes said.

The Upland qualifiers, the title of the projects and their categories are:

Caitlyn Hynes, Conflict and Compromise of the Kindertransport: The British Choice to Save 10,000 Children, Senior Individual Exhibit.

Rachel Delman, Jenna Mohl and Stephanie Mohl, Neville Chamberlain's Policy of Appeasement: How Compromise Did Not Prevent Conflict, Senior Group Exhibit.

Elisabeth Wroth, The Forgotten Ones: The Conflicts and Compromises of Sir Nicholas Winton, Senior Individual Performance.

The Summit High School national qualifying project is a Senior Group Exhibit by Leanne Garcia and Moriah Schnose entitled, The Berlin Conference: Conflict and Compromises in the Age of Empires.

The National History Day contest engages students in grades 6-12 in discovery and interpretation of historical topics related to an annual theme. Students produce creative and scholarly projects in the form of exhibits, documentaries, historical papers, performances, or web sites.