Greene County High School is sending two groups of students to today’s Iowa High School Speech Association State Large Group contest.

Choral Reading and One Act Play qualified from the district contest from January 24th when each entry received a Division I-rating from the room judge. Sophomore Allie Hinote is the lone student that is competing in both Choral Reading and One Act Play and she describes her reaction when both made it to state.

“For Choral Reading I wasn’t really surprised. I kind of expected it just because that’s how it usually goes when doing speech. But for our One Act, it wasn’t like we had a bad group of girls, it was just the script is a little harder because there’s a lot of rhyming. So I wasn’t quite sure if we made, I just knew that we weren’t going to get a (Division) III(-rating) and I was okay with that.”      

Senior Rym Gherairi is a part of Choral Reading with “The Lorax” and she talks about some of the things that their group worked on to improve before today’s competition.

“One of those things that the (district) judge outlined for us is that we had to work on our like harmony and togetherness, a little bit, just to be more together. Another thing is like eye contact. I feel like we need to work a little bit more on that. But overall, I think it was really, really good.”      

The state contest for Greene County is at West Des Moines Valley High School. The groups that qualify for the all-state festival not only receive a Division I-rating, but they must also be nominated by the judges. Those qualifiers will get released Monday afternoon.