Cherokee County Schools Sweep State Reading Bowl, Claim First Place at Both Middle and High School Levels

Cherokee County students swept multiple individual categories at TomeCon, with Creekland Middle also earning second-place honors in the statewide reading bowl

Three Cherokee County schools traveled to Athens for the annual TomeCon state conference — and came home with hardware at every level of competition.

E.T. Booth Middle School and Etowah High School each captured first-place finishes in the statewide reading bowl, while Creekland Middle School added a second-place team title. Altogether, Cherokee County students collected more than a dozen individual podium finishes across the two-day event, a showing that puts the district among the strongest literary competitors in Georgia.

TomeCon is the annual conference of the Tome Student Literacy Society, a national student organization that promotes reading through club programming, community service, and academic competition. The conference draws participants in grades 2 through 12 from across Georgia and pairs learning sessions with a wide range of individual and team events — everything from book trailers and fan fiction to theme essays, book review blogs, and digital cover redesigns. Think of it as a state academic meet, but built entirely around books.

The E.T. Booth Middle School Reading Bowl Team claimed the middle school first-place title under coaches Amanda Graves and Kaity Imbriano. The 21-member squad — one of the larger competitive rosters at the event — included Demi Adekunle, Averie Allen, Aiden Antony, Samruddhi Bandyopadhyay, Adveek Banerjee, Jahnavi Bellamkonda, Rijo Beniston Raja, Lilah Bourgault, Joanna Chen, Boubacar Diallo, Eliza Goodloe, Meliyah Ivey, Rohnish Jena, Lily Jones, Kritaj Kode, Raquel Lopez-Calderon, Rishabh Pandya, Kara Shervington, Alice Terra de Freitas, David Tetteh, and Pranav Vasishta. E.T. Booth, on Putnam Ford Drive in Woodstock, serves sixth through eighth graders.

Etowah High School's five-member Reading Bowl Team matched that first-place finish at the high school level. Jasem Amer, Ava Bourgault, Olivia Jackson, Rohan Pandya, and Skylee Poirrier earned the top honor under coaches Hal Funderburk, Melissa Grier, and Jamie Lester. Etowah, on Etowah Drive in Woodstock, is one of five high schools in the Cherokee County School District.

The Bourgault name appearing on both rosters — Lilah at E.T. Booth and Ava at Etowah — was one of the weekend's quieter storylines: siblings competing for the same county, on the same day, each winning a state championship.

Individual competitors from both Woodstock schools added considerably to the county's medal count. First-place individual finishes went to Olivia Jackson of Etowah for Book Review Blog; Rohnish Jena of E.T. Booth for Book Trailer; Rishabh Pandya of E.T. Booth for Fan Fiction; and Violet Paul of Etowah for Character Yearbook Superlative.

Creekland Middle School, located in Canton, rounded out a strong district performance by finishing second in the middle school reading bowl. Coaches Laura Brown and Elise Creech guided a team of Lakhith Atmakuri, Mitchell Bales, Darcy Chesson, Gautham Davuluri, Cardyn Henderson, Kennedy Knott, and Scarlett Smith to the runner-up spot — no small feat in a field that included schools from across the state.

Second-place individual honors went to Rishabh Pandya of E.T. Booth for Book Review Blog, Rohan Pandya of Etowah for Fan Fiction, and Lydia Paul of Etowah for Digital Cover Redesign. Third-place finishes were earned by Joanna Chen of E.T. Booth for Like, Try, Why Infographic; Rohnish Jena of E.T. Booth for Theme Essay; Zofia Kuczma of Etowah for Book Trailer; Pranav Vasishta of E.T. Booth for Book Print Video; Natalie Vest of Etowah for Character to Author Letter; and Hailey Yeager of Etowah for Book Talk.

For Cherokee County families, the results are a reminder that competitive reading — the kind that demands close analysis, creative thinking, and sustained engagement with a text — is alive and well in local schools. The students who stood on that Athens stage didn't just read books. They dissected them, argued about them, wrote about them, and, in the end, outperformed every other school in Georgia.