Charles Megginson September 7, 2022 Government, Headlines
A change to the health insurance held by retirees of Delaware’s state government is causing an uproar.
The state’s requirement that retirees and pensioners switch from original Medicare to a specially-tailored Medicare Advantage plan has led to charges that retirees will lose their doctors or be denied services that are currently covered.
That’s not true, said Delaware Secretary of Human Resources Claire DeMatteis.
She insists the plan will be cheaper for retirees while offering the same access to care. It will even include a few perks, she said, such as SilverSneakers, a fitness program for senior citizens.
DeMatteis said 95% of Delaware doctors who accept traditional Medicare have already signed on to participate in the Advantage plan. State officials are working to get others on board, too.
The shift is necessary to reduce the state’s $10 billion unfunded liability for retiree healthcare, according to DeMatteis. Left unchanged, that liability would likely grow to $31 billion by 2050.
An unfunded liability is when the state sets aside less than is needed to cover the expected full costs of benefits for its retirees.
With the Medicare Advantage plan, officials project the unfunded liability will shrink to $3 billion by 2050.
“That’s still not perfect, but much better than the current state,” DeMatteis said. “Because the worst case scenario is the unfunded liability grows so severely that the state can no longer afford to pay for retiree health care. That won’t happen because of the very reasonable, measured reforms that we’re implementing now.”
Rep. John Kowalko, D-Newark, who voted for the change in the FY 2023 budget, said the reforms are anything but reasonable and measured, and the governor’s administration quietly pushed the change through the legislature without them having all the details.
“This is a g-d d-mn freaking abuse of the retirees of Delaware,” Kowalko said. “When you put this type of Medicare Advantage plan in place as the only option available for retirees, what you’re actually doing is privatizing Medicare.”
He believes the program will require additional referrals and pre-authorizations for medical care that retirees can access now without the red tape.
“What this means is that the most efficient health care plan that we offer in this country, next to the [Veterans Affairs] plan, will be at the mercy of for-profit enterprises — in this case, Highmark,” Kowalko said.
DeMatteis said it’s true that some services that are “not medically necessary” will meet higher scrutiny under the new plan, but that’s just one of the factors that will bring the overall cost down.
Traditional insurance, including the plans active state employees use, have had prior authorization requirements for decades, she noted.
“When it came out 40 years ago, people didn’t understand what managed care was,” DeMatteis said. “But we’ve been living with managed care very successfully now for 40 years and managed care is just that — it’s to make sure there’s an extra step to ensure that healthcare service is medically necessary.”
According to data from Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, during the past two years, 92% of all prior authorizations were approved initially. Of the 8% that were denied, at least 1% were overturned on appeal.
“So then you have to look at that 7% of healthcare services that are denied because they’re not medically necessary,” DeMatteis said. “It has nothing to do with emergency services and has nothing to do with life-threatening chronic care conditions, but 7% of what we previously had been paying for without any questions asked may be deemed not medically necessary and quite frankly, very costly.”
Former state Sen. Karen Peterson, D-Christiana, called prior authorization requirements a “barrier to care.”
Retired Sen. Karen Peterson, D-Christiana
Peterson pointed to an April 2022 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General which found that the companies offering Medicare Advantage programs “sometimes delayed or denied Medicare Advantage beneficiaries’ access to services, even though the requests met Medicare coverage rules.”
“Some of those delays lasted months and others resulted in death,” Peterson said. “While waiting for pre-authorization, some people have died.”
DeMatteis said the pre-authorization requirement will root out things like cosmetic and experimental surgeries — not life-saving care.
“Is it possible that somebody who’s receiving medication for a chronic care condition will need prior authorization when they seek approval for the first time under Medicare Advantage? Possibly, yes,” she said.
“But if it’s a chronic care condition and it’s life-threatening and there’s a history of that patient receiving it and it helps their condition, it’s not going to be denied.”
Requiring prior authorization for certain prescriptions and procedures isn’t the only thing Highmark plans to do to wrangle costs.
The company has been working with Delaware hospitals over the past two years to “make them understand” that the reimbursement rates they were charging under traditional Medicare were unfair, DeMatteis said.
“For health care to be sustainable, particularly for our seniors, we had to shift the cost differential,” she said. “So the reason it’s possible to move to Medicare Advantage is because of the work Highmark did with our hospitals to lower reimbursement rates.”
Most importantly, she said, the plan will have a heightened focus on preventative care and management of chronic care conditions “so that seniors don’t get really sick and then need more expensive care.”
Rep. Ruth Briggs King, R-Georgetown
Rep. Ruth Briggs King agrees that something had to change.
“The plan is pretty much similar to Medicare and I think there’s a lot more information to be shared,” she said. “When you read on the internet negative things about Medicare Advantage and it’s a privatized plan, it’s not one that’s been constructed by the state with a special contract.”
Kowalko said there are better ways to stabilize the pension benefit plan that wouldn’t require a switch to Medicare Advantage.
“Take the $122 million that you proposed to waste on reconstructing Legislative Hall and put that into this pension benefit fund,” Kowalko said. “Then take the other $150 million that this governor has yanked out of the budget surplus under his bullsh-t budget smoothing plan and put that in there. That quarter of a billion dollars will go a long way to smoothing the gap that is existing right now in our ability to appropriately fund the pension benefits plan.”
Sen. Dave Lawson, R-Marydel, said there’s plenty of waste in the state budget that the General Assembly should look at cutting, but changing the agreement the state made with its retirees on the medical coverage they’d receive isn’t where the government should start.
Kowalko said the switch to Medicare Advantage was slipped into the FY 2023 budget during the Joint Finance Committee’s annual mark-up process.
There was little to no discussion on the item during the committee hearing, he said, and the change was approved “just like hundreds of mark-ups in front of the JFC.”
“It was spit out into the budget and passed by General Assembly,” Kowalko said. “On June 30, we … say ‘Our work’s done here — another good year accomplished.’ And then a month later, the details of what we’ve done, inadvertently, without our knowledge, but inexcusably, is coming back to bite our retirees in the godd-mned a-s.”
Lawson said it’s not fair to suggest that legislators knew they’d be changing retirees’ health insurance when they voted on the budget.
“The only thing we voted on was to reduce the $10 billion underfunded liability by taking 1% of the annual budget each year and putting it toward that,” he said. “To say that we voted on it — yes, we voted on the 1%, but we didn’t vote on the intricacies of this contract. They say they haven’t even finalized the contract.”
Kowalko said he’s asked repeatedly for a copy of the contract so that he can determine whether there are any loopholes that the General Assembly might take advantage of to delay the plan’s implementation.
“I don’t know whether it will require legislative action,” he said. “But I do know that legislative action certainly would be one path to redeeming ourselves as representatives of the people.”
Briggs King said she feels the process was “open and transparent,” but she’s approaching the matter with “guarded optimism.”
“I just think that a lot of people didn’t think it would be that big of a change,” she said. “But I don’t think many people agree that it’s going to be devastating and I certainly think that this might be a better option rather than dropping some other retiree benefits.”
Lawson said there are too many unanswered questions about the new plan.
“They held the meetings but I sat through one of those and I felt like it was an infomercial from Dr. Oz,” Lawson said. “If you’re selling a product, you’re probably going to tout the goodness of it and kind of let the other things slide.”
DeMatteis said her mother, who recently passed away, was a state employee for more than 25 years.
“She’d be asking the same questions — but I would never do anything that would hurt her health care,” she said. “That’s why I’m confident that this is the right thing to do.”
On Sept. 3, Kowalko and Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton, D-Newark, emailed DeMatteis asking to see a copy of the contract as agreed upon in Feb. 2022.
“I have received a lot of questions and concerns from my constituents on this matter,” Wilson-Anton wrote. “An understanding of the proposed amendments to the February plan is necessary for me to better serve my constituents. My understanding is that these documents are public records and should be made available to us.”
As of Tuesday, Wilson-Anton hadn’t received a response from DeMatteis, she said.
Lawson said he also asked to see a copy of the contract and was told “it’s not finished yet,” and “it’s proprietary.”
“Wait a minute — it’s a public contract,” Lawson said. “So it’s just things like that — for me, it doesn’t pass the smell test and I’m suspicious and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it.”
DeMatteis told Delaware LIVE News “the contract is not finalized.”
“We knew we would need to amend it before implementation started on Jan. 1 so that actually is not an issue,” DeMatteis said. “Rep. Kowalko, I think, is trying to play both sides of that. He’s trying to say, ‘If you don’t have a final contract, then you can delay it,’ and, ‘How could you sign a final contract before the General Assembly voted on it?”
DeMatteis said Highmark, “to their credit,” is addressing some concerns raised by retirees and the state is “actively amending the final contract as we speak — so that actually is not an issue.”
In addition to SilverSneakers, the new plan will offer 28 free home-delivered meals for up to 14 days following discharge from an inpatient hospital stay.
Kowalko isn’t sold. He said instead of being called Medicare Advantage, the program should be called the “Draconian disadvantage plan.”
Lawson said he’s heard the phrase, “You can keep your doctor” before and it didn’t turn out too well the last time.
“I don’t like the way that government runs around speaking from any orifice that they decide to speak from,” Lawson said. “Can we just be honest?”
State of Delaware Medicare-eligible pensioners and dependents who are enrolled in the Highmark BCBS Delaware Special Medicfill Plan with prescription will automatically transition to the Highmark BCBS Delaware Freedom Blue PPO Medicare Advantage plan with prescription through SilverScript effective Jan. 1, 2023.
According to a frequently-asked-questions sheet from the state, pensioners should not elect to opt-out of the plan if they only have medical and prescription plan coverage through the State of Delaware.
“State of Delaware pensioners will receive the same covered services including coverage outside of the U.S. and medically necessary home health services under the Highmark BCBS Delaware Freedom Blue PPO Medicare Advantage Plan as they did under the Highmark BCBS Delaware Special Medicfill Medicare Supplement Plan,” the state says on the FAQ sheet.
For retirees who no longer live in the state, the Medicare Advantage plan provides access to any doctor, specialist, hospital or other medical provider who is eligible to participate in Medicare, although they are not required to accept Medicare Advantage.
Benefits and coverage levels are the same for medically necessary covered benefits in and out of the network, according to the state.
More information on the Highmark BCBS Delaware Freedom Blue PPO Medicare Advantage Plan, including a Summary of Benefits, will be available in September. Information can also be viewed at DelawarePensions.com .
For a list of frequently asked questions and answers, click here .
Medicare Advantage plans, sometimes called “Part C” or “MA plans,” are offered by private companies approved by Medicare. The plans are commonly seen as a cheaper alternative to traditional Medicare plans.
Advantage plans bundle together parts A, hospital coverage, and B, doctor and outpatient services.
All state retirees, including retired Delaware teachers and college and university faculty covered through the state of Delaware’s health benefits, will be switched to the Freedom Blue PPO Medicare Advantage plan administered by Blue Cross Blue Shield.
State officials say the new plan will offer pensioners all of the same benefits offered with the State of Delaware’s 2022 Special Medicfill plan, including $0 copays and the same access to doctors and hospitals.
Retirees will receive a new Freedom Blue PPO Medicare Advantage plan ID card in December 2022. Enrollees are encouraged to use the new ID card for all care beginning Jan. 1, 2023. State retirees will no longer have to present their red, white, and blue Medicare card for care, but are encouraged to keep them in a safe place.
Members must keep and continue to pay their Medicare Part B premium with the new coverage. The Freedom Blue PPO does not include Part D prescription drug coverage, but pensioners will continue to receive prescription drug coverage from the State of Delaware Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage through SilverScript administered by CVS Caremark.
In February 2022, the State Employee Benefits Committee awarded a 3-year contract to Highmark Delaware for administration of a Medicare Advantage plan to be available to eligible State of Delaware pensioners and dependents beginning Jan. 1, 2023 and to replace the current Highmark BCBS Special Medicfill Medicare Supplement Plan.
According to state officials, the change in the Medicare pensioner health plan offering is part of the broader review that has been underway with the Retirement Benefits Study Committee.
DeMatteis said additional information will be available this month.
“Typically, in other years, we’d start communicating with seniors about their Medicare in September but because of this change, we started communicating with them June 1,” she said. “In October, we’ll have 18 public education sessions up and down the state.”
The state will send out two more mailers in September and hold a town hall event on Sept. 12 with lawmakers and stakeholders present to answer questions.
The Sept. 12 event will be 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Joseph West Jones Building at Goldey-Beacom College, located at 4701 Limestone Road in Wilmington. For more information, click here .
Meanwhile, Kowalko and New Castle County Councilwoman Lisa Diller have teamed up to form RiseDelaware, which stands for “Retirees Investing in State Equity Delaware.”
The group is described as “a new membership organization dedicated to educating, advocating and informing State of Delaware retirees about what is happening with their health and pension benefits.”
“State legislators could demand that this contract be put on hold and investigate the matter,” Kowalko said in a press release announcing the group’s formation. “They need to do their own research and not to trust canned email responses crafted by the administration for their constituents.”
Charlie Megginson covers government and politics for Town Square LIVE News. Reach him at (302) 344-8293 or [email protected] Follow him on Twitter @cmegginson4.
The State Senate unanimously passed a bill Thursday to remove the cap on the amount of money a police officer or firefighter can earn when out of work on disability. All 21 senators signed on as co-sponsors. Under current law, when an officer or firefighter is out on disability, any earnings greater than that which they collected at the time of disability are deducted from their disability pension. That arbitrary cap means that officers and firemen are prevented from earning more than they made when they became injured. RELATED: Bill would remove earnings cap on police, firefighter disability pay House Bill 308, sponsored by Rep. Pete Schwartzkopf, D-Rehoboth, removes that cap, effectively allowing those individuals to maintain their disability pay regardless of outside earnings during their recovery. The bill now heads to Gov. John Carney for his signature.
Droves of students will not be held back because of interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Delaware educators say. Instead, schools will bear down on core math and English skills. They’re also planning ways to help kids catch up through various programs in the summer and when they return to school in the fall. “We’re trying our best to deliver on a valuable year of instruction for our kids, and to reach the kids that might be falling behind,” said Delaware Secretary of Education Susan Bunting. “We’re trying to get to them now, not wait until summer or next year.” Ultimately, she said, educators believe it may take as long as four years to bring all the kids back to the level they should be at after their last two school years were disrupted with switches to virtual classes and then to a mix of in-person and virtual classes. “I think every student will be impacted in some way by the last year,” said Robert Fulton, superintendent of Cape Henlopen School District. Some students will need more help than others, he said. “We have to be thinking long,” said Colonial School District Superintendent Peter Leida, “and in some ways, the pandemic can help us rethink education. School wasn’t always working for every single kid anyway. So maybe we can make some adjustments, changes to some of the things we’re doing so that we’re not only going to catch the kids, we’re actually creating a better system for kids.” One key to helping students succeed next year will be evaluating where they are now and deciding what kind of help they need. The U.S. Department of Education has told Delaware it must participate in federal assessment testing, which was skipped last spring. But the state has options about how to do it. It can allow third to eighth grade students to complete the Smarter Balance test remotely, and it also may test as late as the start of the 2021-2022 school year in the fall. Students could be back in classrooms full time by then. Bunting sent the feds a letter Friday asking to be allowed to use the more flexible arrangements. In the meantime, Bunting and school district superintendents say, each district continues to evaluate students with routine in-house assessments to add a deeper dimension to understanding a child’s grasp of school work rather than simply relying on grades or a teacher’s opinion. “We have to be diligent about finding out where that child is,” Bunting said. “And then what can we do to fill in. We call it unfinished learning.” The system needs the data, Leidl said, but he’s sorry schools will have to give up two weeks of classes to get it. That information will be critical as districts plan summer programs, which have federal CARES Act money designated to pay for them, as well as other funding. Colonial School District has surveyed parents about what they’d like to see, and Cape Henlopen is surveying teachers to see who will be willing to work this summer, but neither has decided on programming. Some of the extra help for kids could come in the new school year with afterschool programs and Saturday academies for elementary school grades, educators say. Those programs likely will include basic course material, but also enrichment activities such as music, art and robotics that use classroom knowledge but are also fun, encourage creativity and help teach critical thinking. “There’s a sense of urgency here,” said Candice Buchanan, president of the Summer Learning Collaborative in Wilmington. It helps plan summer programs for Hilltop and Kingwood community centers. “But if we focus too heavily on the wrong thing like test scores, we’re not going to be in a position to set our kids up for success.” Holding kids back As the pandemic closed school doors, some students struggled with virtual formats while others soared. Some weren’t able to be in all their classes because they had three people in the household trying to use the internet or a single device to share for school, Bunting said. As stories circulated about schools having nearly half of students not showing up for online classes, the state and Delaware Department of Education poured millions of federal CARES dollars into providing internet service and devices to help kids get online. They also poured money into positions for experts who could help. “Remember that we have a full staff working right now,” Bunting said. ”So people who are reading interventionists or reading specialists or math coaches for students or special needs, psychiatrists or social workers, the full array of our staff members are working. So there’s a lot of effort, even though we had some students who are not as diligent.” Not every child’s needs have been met, she acknowledged, but no one wants to hold a large number of students back. There is a lot of evidence that it not only doesn’t really work, but also creates a lot of other problems, educators say.. It’s possible more students will be held back than normal, said Robert Fulton, superintendent of the Cape Henlopen School District. But not huge numbers. “In general terms, I’m not in favor of retention as a way to improve student performance,” he said. “I think It’s better to gauge areas of weakness and put together specific plans for students to improve in those areas … I’d rather think about it as supports for students based on where they are.” The issue is different for kindergarten through eighth grade students than it is for high schoolers. High schoolers must pass a certain number of units to graduate. Districts can offer the units at other times to keep those kids on track, educators said. Summer programs One reason educators are focusing on summer activities is that they feel students have support now and are too stressed after a day of Zoom classes to tackle additional assignments and classes. At the same time, Bunting said, “We […]
A Dunkin’ franchisee who says he can’t get enough change from is bank will buy coins. Photo by Jeff Weese of Pexels Hot coffee, donuts, breakfast sandwiches and free money. What do these things have in common? All of them are being offered at four Wilmington-area Dunkin’ locations. Before you start the car and drive off to Dunkin’s Claymont, Wilmington, Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania, and Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, locations for your free money, be aware you’re going to have to fork over some change. Franchisee Rick Patel has started a promotion to buy coins from customers. His stores will pay you $105 in cash for every $100 you bring in coins. Patel says he was forced to get creative after his bank stopped giving him the boxes of coins he needed for his stores to operate normally. “When I go to the bank for change, they give me two rolls of quarters, five rolls of pennies, and that only lasts me about half a day at one of my stores,” Patel said. Patel got the idea for the coin-buyback after a bank teller encouraged him to offer his customers incentives for their coins. He began by offering free drinks, but quickly realized that no incentive was quite as powerful as cold, hard cash. “In the beginning I was giving out free drinks, coffee, iced coffee, and donuts, and then I started the $5 promotion.” Patel said he struggled to find coins during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but after a while things returned to normal. It wasn’t until recently that banks stopped offering him coins again. “Throughout the last two months or so, banks have stopped giving out boxes of coins. They only have so many quarters for all the small businesses,” said Patel. “So it is tough right now for small businesses, but there’s so much change just laying around in people’s houses right now.” He posted the offer on social media on July 6. The promotion was highly successful the first week, but has slowed a bit in its second. Patel plans to continue the offer until he has enough coins to operate his businesses normally. To exchange your coins for cash, you can bring them to the morning manager at any of these four locations: 3224 Philadelphia Pike, Claymont, Delaware 1702 Faulkland Road, Wilmington, Delaware 1406 Naamans Creek Road, Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania 4589 Edgemont Ave., Brookhaven, Pennsylvania
TOP: LOUIS L. REDDING SCHOOL IN 1952. BOTTOM: AN ARCHITECT’S RENDERING OF LOUIS L. REDDING MIDDLE SCHOOL IN 2026. Voters in Appoqunimink School District have overwhelmingly voted in favor of a referendum to renovate and expand the historic Louis L. Redding Middle School in Middletown. Unofficial results released Tuesday night showed that the measure passed by a vote of 2,992 to 106. The vote was marketed as a “no tax increase referendum” because the district has already secured the funding for the project through its own savings and the state’s contributions. The 69-year old Redding Middle School suffers from several outdated and failing systems that are original to the building and have become more expensive to maintain than to replace. Through a combination of taxpayer money, developer impact fees and growth in the tax assessment base, Appoqunimink School District has committed to funding the local portion of the construction costs — 24% or $13.675 million. The state will fund the remaining 76% of project costs — $43.305 million — using money it has set aside for major projects like the one at Redding. Appoqunimink superintendent Matthew Burrows said in a statement that he is happy and relieved the district will be able to give Redding students and staff a school capable of delivering the same 21st-century education as the rest of the district’s facilities. “I’d like to thank our parents, our staff, our volunteers, and this fantastic community,” Burrows said. “Your support at the polls have made this a very happy holiday for our District.” Appoquinimink School Board president Michelle Wall, whose two children both attended Louis L. Redding Middle School, agreed. “With the successful passage of this no-tax referendum, the residents of the Appoquinimink School District again showed what is important to all of us…community,” she said in a statement. The passage of the referendum was the result of the “collective efforts of our district community that will allow us to move forward with the renovations and restoration of this special school,” Wall said. “I am confident that the future of Redding will be just as bright as its historic legacy.” After the numbers were announced to a room filled with volunteers and staff Tuesday evening, former Redding principal and referendum co-chair Cyndi Clay offered some closing thoughts. “I have been blessed to live in this community all my life. I’m part of the history of Redding,” Clay said. “I was a student here. My husband and all three of our children went here as well. Finally, our turn has come. I’m grateful that the community understood the need and responded to our call for support. What we did today will make a difference in our future.”
Chase Martinez shovels sand during a Delaware Science Olympiad bridges event as Joseph Mlodak uses two rods to stop the bucket from swinging. As Chase Martinez filled a bucket hanging from his balsa wood bridge with sand, the structure began making ominous popping sounds and he shoveled faster. “I thought it was going to crack,” he said. But, when time was called in the bridges event at the Delaware Science Olympiad Saturday, the bridge hadn’t collapsed before the six-minute deadline. “That’s the first one I’ve had today that didn’t crack,” proctor Win Bookhart told Chase and his partner Joseph Mlodak. The sixth- and seventh-graders from St. Mary Magdalene School were two of the 250 students from around Delaware taking part of the 2022 Science Olympiad construction competitions at Cab Calloway School of the Arts. It was the first time since 2019 that the construction events could be moved indoors. Held for years at Delaware State University in Dover, Science Olympiad was canceled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the construction events were held outdoors where wind and the rough surface of parking lots challenged the builders. This year, the knowledge tests were taken online and the construction events such as bridges, mousetrap vehicles, storm the castle, the Wright stuff, solar power, sounds of music, it’s about time and ping pong parachute were moved indoors. The names sound funny, but participating is not a joke. Science Olympiad is a national program designed to enhance STEM education. Many college applications ask whether a student participated in Science Olympiad and how they placed. Middle and high schools form teams of students who pick several events in which to participate. The contests not only given individual awards, but total points from schools to name school winners, too. Some of the competitions require students to study fields such as cell biology or Delaware trees and take timed knowledge tests. The construction events require students to build devices from scratch that must meet specific standards and perform in specific ways. While the bridges are tested for structural integrity, events such as gravity vehicles require them to stop at a precise point. Chase and Joseph picked the bridges event because it seemed like fun. “Once when I was in, like fourth or fifth grade, we built a bridge in class,” Chase said. “I really liked building it. So I just wanted to do it again.” Tower Hill junior Ben Jordan, left, and senior Ben Miao tweak their gravity vehicle. He and Joseph were surprised to be told by Bookhart that they had actually over-engineered their bridge. Bookhart pointed out several pieces on the bridge that he thought were redundant and made the bridge weigh more than it needed to. It only had to hold until they hit 33 pounds in the bucket swinging from the bridge. While it’s admirable to get to 41 pounds, their ultimate score would have been higher with a lighter bridge. Over in the gym, Tower Hill junior Ben Jordan and senior Ben Miao were tweaking their gravity vehicle to try to get their car as close as possible to the spot it was supposed to stop on. Jordan has participated in Science Olympiad before. “It’s a lot of fun because you are really pushing the limits on, like the accuracy thing,” he said. “It’s very easy to get close but it gets really hard to get super close.” This is the first time Miao participated in Science Olympiad. He got involved, he said, because he took a physics class this year. Cab junior Shay Wilson and senior Pinky Huang were two of the few young women competitors visible that day. They stood in the corner of the gym waiting for their chance to shoot off a rocket that contained a parachute anchored by a ping pong ball. Huang thinks fewer women participate because there are fewer women in STEM classes and science fields. She plans to go into international business, but really likes science, she says. Wilson plans to be a wildlife veterinarian. She said she liked the experience of working with different materials, dealing with a topic she was unfamiliar with, and having to be able to adapt to perform. State director Gordon Lipscy said Saturday’s events were expected to have 21 teams from 15 middle schools and 41 teams from about 30 schools. That’s about half of the number participating before COVID and he hopes next year to begin building back to the one-day event for only middle and only high schools. They all ended in a giant assembly in which winners were announced. The top 10 students in each contest walked to the stage to get medals, and schools could loudly celebrate their places in the overall rankings. “I can’t wait to get back indoors and have medal ceremonies,” Lipscy said.
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