The Carson High School culinary-arts team skipped last year’s ProStart competition as a protest, with organizers saying the team receives too little funding from the Nevada Restaurant Association and Carson City School District.
That changed this year after seniors Andrea Davis, 18, and Genoa Donaldson, 17, begged to participate, teacher Penny Reynolds said. The decision paid off, as the team took gold in the hot-foods category of the competition in Las Vegas.
It’s always gratifying when the capital is well-represented in our larger neighbor to the south, but the victory means even more to Davis, Donaldson and fellow team members Max DeMar, Dakota Martinez and Christian Kivi. Each gets $21,000 in scholarship money, a healthy haul even in today’s days of escalating college costs.
Davis was further individually recognized as the ProStart Student of the Year, and Reynolds, who created Carson High’s program, was named Teacher of the Year.
There’s a wrongheaded tendency to recognize the achievements of sports teams above those of other teams, perhaps because their achievements can be numerically quantified. We praise the team here partly out of pure pride, and partly to help buck that trend.
And the team’s success isn’t newfound. The victory marked its 10th first-place finish in the contest’s 12-year history.
The team is raising money to take part in the national ProStart competition, set for May 3-5 in Minneapolis. You can help with that worthy cause by sending financial donations to CHS Culinary at P.O. Box 603, Carson City, NV 89702.