Temple HS Students Win State Championship in Forensic Science

TEMPLE, Texas — Three Temple High School students are state champions after winning first place in the Forensic Science category at the SkillsUSA State Contest in Corpus Christi earlier this month. The team had advanced to the SkillsUSA State Contest based on its performance at the District competition earlier this year.    

Temple High’s team of Leticia Barros, Hannah DeGraff and Amethie Encarnacion took first-place with a team score of 295.000. Their team total was 33 points higher than the second-place score posted by a team from Cleburne High School. The competition consisted of a laboratory section with six different stations and a written test that averaged the two highest scores from the group. Laboratory stations included: working with blood samples and blood testing, fingerprint lifting and analysis, identifying and testing hair samples, DNA identification, ink analysis and testing and identifying bone samples with a ten-minute time limit for each station. Each team member also had to take a written test over SkillsUSA as an organization in case there was a need for a tiebreaker.

“I was just in shock because I didn’t think we were going to place that high,” Barros said. “It is still surreal to me and I can’t really put it into words because it doesn’t seem real. I do understand now what a big deal it is to be the state champion.”

Encarnacion and DeGraff are both interested in careers in criminal justice and are excited about the ways the state competition can help them prepare for the next step. Barros would like to go into nursing as a career, but also plans to take some of the lessons learned from the Forensic Science competition into her future career. All three of the students referenced the impact of learning to work together toward a common goal and seeing that work pay off with the championship.

“Forensic Science has been what I have wanted to do since I was in seventh grade,” DeGraff said. “Winning the competition helped reassure me that this is what I want to do with my life. This is a way I can make a difference in criminal justice. This is putting me on the right path and helps me feel confident in what I am doing.”

“My passion has always been toward criminal justice,” Encarnacion said. “At first, I wanted to be a lawyer, but competing has really helped me think that I want to pursue this further. Working with this group has really helped me focus on that because we all contributed and were strong in different areas.”

The state championship is even more impressive when you consider the team did not start working together until January and only had one other competition under its belt prior to the state contest. The trio was put together by sponsor Krystal Battreall at the beginning of the semester and quickly developed a chemistry based on teamwork and an understanding of the need to prepare.

“I learned that I work better under stress, especially the stress I put on myself,” Barros said. “We all worked really well together. We studied so hard for this and really crammed the day before and even the day of the competition and that really paid off for us.”

“We really made a point to study every time we had a chance,” Encarnacion said. “We even studied on the bus on the way to competition. We were nervous when we went in to compete, but when we walked in to compete, we were ready to go because of the work we put it before the competition. We all helped support each other and pick each other up.”

Barros and Encarnacion are both seniors and DeGraff is a junior. The state championship may cap the high school Forensic Science careers of the two 12^th graders, but DeGraff is hoping to continue with the same type of success next year.

“I know they won’t be here next year, but I plan on competing in Forensic Science again next year,” DeGraff said. “I felt like this team clicked very well and I am hoping that I can take what I learned from this experience into next year to help make the team even stronger and maybe win another state championship.”