On Saturday, February 11, 2012, at Athens Drive HS in Raleigh, the Smith Middle School MathCounts Team won their MathCounts Chapter Competition coming in 1st out of 28 teams.  MathCounts is the most prestigious national middle school math competition.  Smith has consistently fielded strong teams in the past (Top 10 in the State for six of the past seven years), but this was the first time they had won their Chapter Competition.

Smith was led by 6th-grader Stas Kuzmenko with a near perfect score of 45 (a perfect score is 46) that earned him 2nd place among all individuals.  Other very high scores for Smith included Veronica Kim and Matthew Dai with 43, Jennifer Zou and Andrew Zhang with 42, and Sarah Wu and Vijay Dey with 41.  Seven of the top 16 students were from Smith, including four 6th graders.  Vijay was also the champion of the Countdown Round.  The team is coached by Boyd Blackburn with help from Jaclyn Arnson.

The win qualified the Smith Team for the State Finals to be held at the NC School of Science and Math in Durham on March 16.

This year Smith had over 70 students participate in the MathCounts program which is run as an after-school club meeting once per week starting in the Fall.

Back in November, Smith had also done very well in the AMC8 Math Competition, tying Carnage MS for first place in the state.