Schools
RivCo Girl Competes in National Spelling Bee
14-year-old Shruti Amin of Murrieta takes on the best school-aged spellers in the country for cash and scholarship money.
at Thompson Middle School in Murrieta is among the field of 278 competitors in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which begins today in National Harbor, Md.
Shruti Amin won the Riverside County Spelling Bee in March; today she will take a 50-word computer spelling test at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, with 25 of the words counting toward the score.
On Wednesday, the spellers will take part in rounds two and three, which
are conducted on stage and require students to spell one word in each round.
Spellers earn three points for each correctly spelled word, giving each speller
the chance to earn up to 31 points in the first three rounds.
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At the end of round three, the field will be reduced to a maximum of 50
spellers.
The semifinal and championship rounds will be held Thursday, with a
contestant eliminated after he or she misspells a word.
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Rounds two and three can be seen on the internet via ESPN3.com
beginning at 5 a.m. Wednesday. ESPN2 will carry the semifinals from 7 a.m.-10
a.m. Thursday. The championship finals will be on ESPN from 5-7 p.m. Thursday.
Throughout the entire competition, ESPN3.com will carry a second "play
along'' version, where viewers can watch without seeing the word so they can
test their spelling skills against the champion spellers.
The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below, with contestants ranging in age from 6 -- Lori Anne Madison of Woodbridge, Va., the
youngest speller on record -- to 15 years old.
Shruti is 14, has been playing piano for seven years, enjoys playing
tennis and camping, is president of her school's community service club, vice
president of its science club and treasurer of the National Junior Honor
Society. Her bio for the contest is here.
The winner of the bee will receive $30,000 from Scripps, which owns
television stations and newspapers; a $5,000 scholarship from the Sigma Phi
Epsilon Educational Foundation; $2,600 in reference works from Encyclopaedia
Britannica, including its final print edition, and a lifetime membership to
Britannica Online Premium; a $2,500 U.S. savings bond; a complete reference
library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster; and a Nook Color and
online language course from Middlebury Interactive Languages.
The field consists of students who won locally sponsored bees in all 50
states and the District of Columbia, along with American Samoa, Guam, Puerto
Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Department of Defense schools in Europe.
Eight foreign nations are also represented -- the Bahamas, Canada,
China, Ghana, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.
Southern California has produced only one champion of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which began in 1925 -- Anurag Kashyap of Poway, the 2005 winner.
