Mountlake Terrace High School students enjoyed a rewarding weekend around Western Washington as the Jazz 1 Band was awarded the 1st Place trophy at the Newport Jazz Festival and student journalists picked up numerous honors at the Washington Journalism Education Association (WJEA) state journalism conference.

The MTHS Jazz 1 band took top prize at the annual jazz festival held at Newport High School on Saturday, Mar. 15. In addition, two members of the band were presented with soloist awards at the event, senior Henry Sparks on trombone and junior Jacob Krieger on tenor saxophone.

The jazz band hopes the honors earned at Newport High School are just the beginning of a big spring. Later this month Jazz 1 will travel to Savannah, Georgia for the Swing Central Jazz Festival to compete against 11 other bands from throughout the county. Then the band will be performing as part of Starbucks’ Annual Hot Java Cool Jazz concert at the Paramount Theater in Seattle on April 25; $20 tickets will be available for the event on April 1.

The WJEA handed out dozens of honors at its Washington State Journalism Conference held Saturday at Shorewood High School. At the event the MTHS student newspaper The Hawkeye was presented with the Award of Excellence in the Newsmagazine category and Hawk TV was awarded the Best of Show in the Video Broadcast category.

The WJEA also presented Superior, Excellent and Honorable Mention awards to individual student journalists; here is a listing of MTHS individual honors:
Arsha Kiani, Advertising Design — Excellent rating
Nick Fiorillo, Headline Writing / Copy Editing — Excellent rating
Paxtyn Merten, News Writing — Excellent rating
TK Johnson, Newspaper / Newsmagazine Sports Photography — Excellent rating
Anthony Markert, Sports Feature Writing — Honorable Mention