By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After years of hard work in a variety of academic fields, Mt. Edgecumbe High School senior Rio Bacha has been named a candidate in the 2022 Presidential Scholars Program.
To earn the honor, Bacha scored in the top one percent nationally in the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the American College Testing exams.
Beyond the test taking, Bacha also expressed interest in fields from calculus and environmental science to English and Nordic skiing.
While math has long been a favorite, he’s come to enjoy English thanks to his teachers at MEHS.
“Math has always been (a favorite) because there’s one solution. You learn the equation and then there’s a variety of different problems. And more recently it’s been English, because of the English teachers,” Bacha told the Sentinel Wednesday.
Rio Bacha (Photo provided)
He’s currently studying multivariable calculus, and appreciates the real-life applications of the topic.
“For calculus specifically, the earlier math courses I’d taken, it’s very hard to see the real-world applications but in calculus you can definitely see the real-world applications of derivatives and integrals and use those graphs to see their profit margins or overall growth,” the 17-year-old said.
While he’s read a lot since he was a child, Bacha said he’s only recently started to enjoy English classes.
“I didn’t before I came here honestly, and then the English classes made me enjoy it a lot more than I did. English was my second to least favorite subject and now it’s right up there close to math,” he said.
Under the instruction of Lynn Bastoky he’s read such classics as Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.”
“We had to write essays looking deeper into books and classic American literature, such as looking for their themes, motifs, tones, allusions… ‘The Things They Carried,’ it was a very innovative take on a war story, and also the stories inside were not so much focused on the war, but more the moments that happened in there… (Slaughterhouse Five is) much more sarcastic and you don’t really know what’s real until the very end when he kind of confirms the main character is kind of delusional after the accident and he made the main character an anti-hero, so not really a protagonist, not a good guy, not a bad guy, just some random person who ended up in the war,” Bacha said.
When he was younger, he said, for every 100 books he finished his mother, Miranda Bacha, would bake a cake. But she eventually fell into a deficit.
“She still owes me cakes,” he said.
Miranda Bacha is Mt. Edgecumbe High’s student support services coordinator. Rio’s father, Andrew Bacha, teaches health at MEHS.
After scoring a 1,500 on his SAT and 35 on his ACT – placing him in the top one percent of those who took the tests – Rio Bacha learned of his nomination to the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program in January.
“I was scanning through my email looking for college things, I was looking for one specific college email and I saw that and I was like, ‘Oh what’s this? Looks fancy.’ And I read through it and I immediately called her (his mother) over, because I was afraid it was fake and spam and virus-inducing. And then when she said it was real – disbelief,” he remembered.
The U.S. Department of Education website says the program was formed in 1964 “to recognize and honor some of our Nation’s most distinguished graduating high school seniors… Each year, up to 161 students are named U.S. Presidential Scholars, one of the Nation’s highest honors for high school students.”
Out of about 3.6 million expected to graduate high school this year, more than 5,000 were named Presidential Scholars candidates. That figure will be narrowed to 600 semifinalists in April and then to 161 finalists in May, the program said in a release.
Bacha is the only candidate from Sitka this year. In 2021, Sitka High’s Tayler Clifton was named but wasn’t a finalist.
Lots of effort and practice went into Bacha’s SAT and ACT tests.
“I spent hours doing practice test after practice test after practice test,” he said.
This is Bacha’s second year at MEHS. Though he’s originally from Daytona Beach, Florida, his family moved to rural western Alaska when he was 10. He spent time in Aleknagik, Akiachak and Kodiak, before coming to Sitka.
In Aleknagik, a village near Dillingham, Bacha developed a passion for skiing and photography.
“I liked all of the people there and what you could do. You could cross country ski across the tundra and across the frozen lake,” he said. “That’s where I learned my two favorite hobbies now: cross country skiing and digital photography, because of all the beautiful scenery.”
Sitka, too, “is a beautiful place with lots of hiking. I just discovered the Beaver Lake trail. I went on it for the first time last weekend and it was one of the only sunny days, and I really admire the variety of scenery that was on that trail,” he said.
He was a member of Edgecumbe’s environmental club last year and supports changes to environmental policies.
“Environmentalism basically covers it, a desire to protect it and reduce the stuff we’re currently doing, and we know we’re doing it wrong but we’re doing it anyway,” he said.
After graduation in May, Bacha hopes to attend Duke University in North Carolina, and has applied to Harvard and MIT. He’d like to study computer science, but is open to shifting into environmental science or civil engineering. For the time being, he’s waiting to hear back from universities.
“A lot of information will come in May and until then I’ll just be enjoying high school while I can,” he said.
