For the second consecutive year, a Northport High School team has won a local competition that challenged students to argue an appellate case in front of real judges.

The Long Island Mentor Moot Court Competition asked participating students to serve as fictional lawyers and deliver arguments about an imaginary lawsuit, with judges questioning them to test their knowledge of constitutional law. The championship rounds were held at the federal courthouse in Central Islip.

In the finals, Northport beat a team from Plainview-Old Bethpage JFK High School, which outlasted 42 other groups to win the Nassau County title. To reach the finals, Northport beat more than 20 other teams to win the Suffolk County title, including besting another Northport team in the county finals.

“It’s a really special group,” said Bill Slagle, co-adviser of the Northport team. Of what set the team apart, he said: “It’s preparation. Our attorney coaches just know how to prepare these kids.”

During the competition, teams argued both sides of a hypothetical dispute involving the legality of school officials searching a student’s phone following a senior prank, Slagle said.

Northport’s team members were Ben Gutleber, JohnMichael Kavrakis, Charlotte King and Jacob Lawson, while Plainview-Old Bethpage’s team members were Brady Bornstein, Lauren Katz, Arielle Klingher, Jake Melniker, Shane Menikoff, Asha Reddy, Rishi Sanghvi and Whitney Zizzo.

“Our team worked tirelessly to prepare for this competition, and it showed,” Plainview-Old Bethpage team co-advisers Nancy Rogers and Gina Farrell said in a statement. “We are very proud of the way they represented our school and community.”

MIDDLE ISLAND

America250 Award

Longwood High School history teacher Lauren Goepfert is among 51 teachers nationwide to receive a Teaching America250 Award from the Jack Miller Center, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit committed to “solving the national crisis of uninformed citizenship by teaching America’s founding principles and history,” according to its website. The award includes $5,000 for an educational project on the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary.

Goepfert’s project will have students visit the National Constitution Center, Independence Hall and Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia to collect audio and video recordings for a public-service announcement highlighting the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, according to the center.

NEW HYDE PARK

New principal

Colleen Topping has been appointed principal of Manor Oaks School in the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park school district. She replaced Jane Ruthkowski, who retired.

Topping, who has worked in the district for 20 years, was previously an assistant principal for both Manor Oaks School and New Hyde Park Road School. She began her career in the district as a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at Manor Oaks.

“This is where my journey as an educator began, and it is an incredible honor to now lead a community that has shaped who I am,” Topping said.

ISLANDWIDE

‘Solve for Tomorrow’

Teams from Sewanhaka High School in Floral Park, Valley Stream North High School and West Hempstead High School and two teams from Jericho High School were among 500 semifinalists nationwide in Samsung’s “Solve for Tomorrow” contest. The competition challenged students to show how real-world issues can be improved through science, technology, engineering and math — also known as STEM.

West Hempstead’s team, for example, proposed designing a vertical axis wind turbine that could power streetlights and warning signs by being “mounted on highway median barriers to harvest wind energy from passing traffic,” according to the school.

The teams received $1,000 grants to further develop their ideas, but none was among the 100 teams selected for the competition’s next stage, according to Samsung.