The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts held its 31^st annual Commencement celebrating the graduation of the Class of 2025 at the Oaklawn Event Center on Saturday, May 17.

The ceremony honored 95 graduates from 36 counties. The graduates earned $25.2 million in scholarship offers, pushing the overall total to $353.7 million over the school’s history. Giuseppe “Seppy” Basili, the executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, served as Commencement speaker. Karilynn Arellano of Mineral Springs and Hailey Judkins of Benton, both members of the Class of 2025, were student speakers.

Fifteen students from the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts earned recognition at the 2025 FBLA State Conference and qualified for the FBLA National Conference.

The state conference was held on April 7-8 at the Little Rock Convention Center. Students competed in categories that included an objective subject test, performance or presentation, or a combination of an objective test and a performance component. The top four competitors in each category qualified to compete at the national competition, which will be held June 26-July 3 in Anaheim, Calif.

Students who qualified for the national competition include:

• Phoenix Dunkley, first place, Client Service;
• the team of Michelle Li and Jeremiah Chen, second place, Computer Game and Simulation Programming;
• April Adams, first place, Cyber Security;
• Nathan Grady, first place, Nathan Grady;
• Tristan Henson, second place, Future Business Leader;
• the team of Aarush Goyal, Kaitleen Toh and Luis Vidal, third place, Hospitality and Event Management;
• Miranda Lee, first place, Sales Presentation;
• the team of Cassie Davis and Lakayla Hall, first place, Sports and Entertainment Management;
• Benjamin Dong, first place, Spreadsheet Applications; and
• the team of Hailey Judkins and Sophie Milton, third place, Website Design.

One other student earned state recognition as Katherine Sedgwick placed seventh in Advertising. ASMSA had 24 total students compete in the state competition.

The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts held its annual Honors Convocation on Monday, May 12. The annual Honors Convocation is an opportunity to recognize the students’ academic achievements for the school year as well as special awards and fellowships.

Maddox Jessup, a senior from Stuttgart, was featured as a student speaker during the event. Students who were recognized included:

The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts will hold its 31^st annual Commencement celebrating the Class of 2025 at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 17, at the Oaklawn Event Center.

Giuseppe “Seppy” Basili, the executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, will serve as the event’s keynote speaker. Basili is a leading K-12, college readiness and higher education expert with 30 years of industry experience. The foundation is dedicated to advancing the education of exceptionally promising students by providing scholarships to students and grants to organizations that serve them.

Senior Hailey Judkins of Benton will serve as the student commencement speaker.

The event is not open to the public. A ticket is required for admission to the ceremony. Tickets were only available to students and their family members.

The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts recognized students for their achievements in the 2025 Arts and Humanities Capstone Symposium during an awards ceremony on May 2.

The symposium is an opportunity for ASMSA students to showcase their talents within the arts and humanities. The event features lectures and performances by students in the fields of arts and literature, creative writing, fine arts, history and music. The lectures and performances are the result of capstone research projects conducted by the students as a required part of ASMSA’s academic program.

Students competed in either Arts, History, and Literature or the Visual and Performing Arts categories. Individual category awards as well as overall winners for each major category were announced during the ceremony.

Damian Biggs, a senior at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, has been selected as a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.

By being one of 70 high school seniors nationwide selected as a scholar, Biggs will receive the Cooke College Scholarship. The scholarship provides last-dollar funding up to $55,000 per year after all institutional aid to pursue a bachelor’s degree at any accredited undergraduate institution. The goal of the scholarship is to help students who have demonstrated exceptional academic ability, leadership and persistence avoid student debt, according to the foundation’s website.

Biggs said earning the scholarship will help him attend the University of Tulsa where plans to study electrical engineering with a minor in innovation and entrepreneurship.

“If someone asked me what outcome I hoped for the most at the beginning of my senior year, this is what it would have been,” Biggs said. “It’s still hard to believe that is real life, and I’m so excited to attend college now. I will always be deeply grateful for receiving this scholarship, and I plan on making full use of it to set myself for an amazing future.”

On the day Biggs found out that he had been selected as a Cooke Scholar, he said he was feeling a bit down. During his lunch break he decided to play video games in his room to relax before his calculus class scheduled for after lunch.

“I was about to start a new quest in my game when I heard my phone buzz and looked down at the email from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation,” Biggs said. “I opened it and immediately felt a surge of excitement as soon as I read the word ‘Congratulations.’ I couldn’t believe it. It felt like every single weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders in that instant. I had never cried tears of joy until reading that email.”

Biggs said he wants his story to inspire other people starting their college journey. He said he was determined to send out as many applications to selective scholarship programs as he could as well as many universities across the country.

“Being selected really showed me that all the hard work and persistence did pay off, and not only am I getting what I wanted from the start, but I hit the home run of scholarships,” Biggs said. “I want to be an example of something working out at the end of the day as long as you keep your head in the game.”

To learn more about the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the College Scholarship program, visit https://www.jkcf.org/our-scholarships/.

A team from the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts is one of 25 teams who have qualified for the ninth Annual All-State Coding Competition that will be held on Monday, April 21.

The team of juniors April Adams of Clinton, Hunter Cox of Vilonia and Mason Vaden of Dardanelle qualified for the 2025 state competition by competing in the All-Region Coding Competition on Feb. 28. A total of 146 teams from across the state participated in regional events earlier this spring to determine 24 participants for the state competition. A team from Conway High School automatically qualified for the state competition after the school produced the first-place team in the 2024 state competition.

The competition features student teams solving coding challenges. Each member of the first-place team in the state competition will receive a $2,000 award that will be deposited in a 529 College Savings Plan. Each member of the second-place team will receive a $1,000 award with third-place earning a $500 award for each member. In addition, the schools that sponsor the first-, second- and third-place teams will receive $10,000, $6,000 and $4,000 respectively to support their computer science programs.

The competition is sponsored by the Arkansas Department of Education.

The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts Quiz Bowl team will play for the Class 7A state title in the Arkansas Governor’s Quiz Bowl Championships.

ASMSA will face Bryant High School in the championship round of the state tournament on Saturday, April 26. The title match will be held at 9 a.m. at Arkansas PBS in Conway. Arkansas PBS will air the match live on its stations across the state as well as streaming online at myarpbs.org/watch.

ASMSA qualified for the title game by going undefeated in the early rounds of the Class 7A state tournament that were held at Little Rock Central High School on April 12. The team had qualified for the state tournament by winning the Class 7A West Regional Tournament in March. That finish allowed ASMSA to enter the tournament as the No. 3 seed, giving it a first-round bye. The team won its two afternoon matches to qualify for the final.

Juniors Ridgely Bond and Jacob Lewis were named to the All-State Tournament Team. They also qualified for the All-Star Tournament to be held on May 3 based on their performance in the regional tournament.

The team is coached by Caleb Grisham, a mathematics Instructor of Excellence at the school. The tournament is sponsored by the Arkansas Governor's Quiz Bowl Association.

Sometime the week after finals, the title match will be posted to youtube.com/arkansaspbs. Photos will available at myarpbs.org/photos.

Maya Allen, a senior at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, has been selected to participate in the prestigious The Jackson Laboratory Summer Student Program.

Each year, about 40 undergraduate and high school students from across the United States are chosen to participate in the 10-week summer program where they conduct genetics and genomics research. Studying with an experienced scientific mentor, participants will develop an independent project, implement their plan, analyze data, and report results. They will present their findings to researchers, other students and parents at the end of the summer.

Allen will participate in the program at the laboratory’s site in Bar Harbor, Maine. The program will run from May 31 through August 8. She is excited about the opportunity to participate in the program.