CHS Students Recognized By National Merit Scholarship Corporation

Four local students were among those recognized recently by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) as semifinalists in the 2012 National Merit Scholarship Program. The students — all from — are Teddy Lavon, Quinn Squyres, Benjamin Reis and Patricia Wong.

Started in 1955, the National Merit Scholarship Program is a competition where students who perform exceptionally well on the 2010 Preliminary SAT (PSAT)/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test are entered into a selection pool to determine who will receive a college scholarship. Approximately 16,000 students are selected out of 1.5 million high school juniors who take the test.

New Jersey has approximately 500 public and 150 private high schools. Less than 22 percent of these schools had any Merit Scholar Semifinalists at all.  Columbia High School joined the 28 percent of schools that had four or more semifinalists in the competition.

In addition to the semifinalists, the NMSC awarded Letters of Commendation to 22 CHS seniors in the 2012 Merit Program. The program recognizes students who show exceptional academic promise and received high scores on the PSAT, taken in their junior year.  The students who received this honor are Dorian Capps, John Daugherty, Maria DiPasquale, Colin Durney, Elizabeth Epstein, Amy French, Camille Gagnier, Miriam Garber, Stowe Hammarberg, Celia Joyce, Hunter Klein, Hannah Lind, Laura Marino, Alexander Mark, Jessica Matalon, Maya Peers-Nitzberg, Dylan Reichman, Elena Riecke, Lauren Upadhyay, Rachel Viqueira, Henry Willshire and Mark Yearick.

Columbia High School also had one semifinalist in the 2012 National Achievement Scholarship Competition. Started in 1963, the competition awards 800 scholarships to students who are picked out of a pool of 1,600 black high school seniors. The award is based on high PSAT scores. The CHS student selected for this honor was Jahaan Scipio.

Two CHS seniors were named Outstanding Participants Referred to U.S. Colleges and Universities. This is part of the National Achievement Scholarship Program and the two students scored in the top three percent of the more than 160,000 Black high school juniors who took the 2010 PSAT.  The students honored were Khari-Elijaj Jarrett and Taiwo Soka.

CHS senior Maya Peers-Nitzberg was selected by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to receive a 2011 NCTE Achievement Award in Writing.  As one of only 10 students in New Jersey and 520 from across the country, Maya was honored for her excellence in writing. CHS was also recognized and commended for excellence in its English Language Arts instructional program.  Maya was nominated for this award by her teacher Joe Lombardo.

Columbia High School instrumentalists, bassist Maggie Woodruff and trumpeter Sean Hack, and choristers, tenor Charles Sachs and bass Roger Sweet, performed two concerts this November with the New Jersey All-State Orchestra and Chorus. Among the highest honors a New Jersey high school music student can achieve, the All-State Orchestra and Chorus is composed of 450 of the best musicians in the state.  To be accepted, each student has to pass a rigorous and highly competitive audition process.  The students performed at the NJEA convention in Atlantic City and, a week later, at New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.