By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., January 25, 2019 – The likelihood that the 2020 Bahamas National Spelling Bee would have become one of the “victims” of Hurricane Dorian and be cancelled this year as a result of the widespread disruption the Category 5 storm caused to the school system of The Bahamas when it rampaged across the northern area of the country early in September 2019 did not materialize.
School districts throughout The Bahamas apparently are preparing to hold competitions to select a district champion or have already done so, as confirmed in a post by Kevin Williams Sr. on his Facebook page that his son, Kevin Williams Jr., a student at Yellow Elder Primary in New Providence, won the Western New Providence Primary District’s Annual Spelling Bee Competition on Thursday, January 23, for the second straight year.
The proud father noted that the competition “started off with 35 young bright spellers in the Sybil Blyden Auditorium” and that Kevin’s winning word was “piratical,” adding that Kevin was supported by his teacher and coach Ms. Barbara Moss. He will represent Yellow Elder Primary in the National Spelling Bee competition on March 8.
Sheila Scavella, head of the Organizing Committee for the Grand Bahama Spelling Bee has confirmed that the Grand Bahama District’s Spelling Bee Competition will be held on February 6, 2020, with a total of 11 schools participating — seven private and four Government schools.
All this is extremely good news personally for me because introducing the Scripps National Spelling Bee to the school system in The Bahamas is one of the major accomplishments in my journalistic career as of which I am immensely proud. The first Bahamas National Spelling Bee held in 1998 to select a Bahamas Spelling Champion to participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. that year.
I previously lived in Washington, D.C., for 21 years before returning to The Bahamas “permanently” in 1996, and for more than 12 years, I was News Editor of The Washington Informer, an award-winning African American-owned newspaper that took over the sponsorship of the D.C. City-Wide Spelling Bee in 1982. I attended my first Scripps Bee in 1983 and was so impressed by its potential to have a tremendous impact on the educational system of The Bahamas that I promised myself back then that whenever I returned to The Bahamas I would make a concerted effort to convince those responsible for the administration of education in the country to support my idea to annually select a spelling champion to participate in the Scripps Bee.
Back then, newspapers were the primary sponsors of competitions through which Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants were determined, and when I became Editor of the Nassau Guardian in 1997, I discussed my idea with Kenneth “Six” Francis, the then Publisher and General Manager of The Guardian, and he threw his full support behind my initiative.
Fortunately, at the time Dion Foulkes was Minister of State for Education. As everyone in The Bahamas should know by now, whatever skills I possess in my chosen profession of journalism were nurtured and developed by Dion’s father, Sir Arthur Foulkes, who was News Editor at The Tribune when I joined that newspaper’s editorial staff as a trainee reporter in May of 1960. I later joined Sir Arthur at The Bahamian Times in 1965 after it was established several years earlier by the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) to promote its political message among the Bahamian electorate. So, I have known Dion since he was a little boy who distributed copies of Bahamian Times and consider him to be a “brother.”
My “brother” Dion did not have to do much to convince the then Minister of Education Ivy Dumont, who later became Governor General of The Bahamas, to fully support the first Bahamas National Spelling Bee, given her life-long commitment to the educational development of young Bahamians. A good friend of mine, Agatha Dean Delancy, and Tonya Adderley, who were both then employed by IBM Bahamas, helped to convince IBM’s then General Manager Felix Stubbs to become a principal sponsor along with The Guardian of the first Bahamas National Spelling Bee in 1998.
The winner was Dominique Higgins, a 12-year-old Jordan Prince William High student, and he performed exceptionally well in the Scripps competition, but did not advance to the finals. Incidentally, 1998 was the year 12-year-old Jody-Anne Maxwell, Jamaica’s spelling champion, made history as the first non-American to win Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Every year since then our spelling champions have performed exceptionally well, but none of them has advanced to the finals. I am convinced that this is because our spellers prepare for the Scripps Bee by learning to spell words by rote, rather than practicing to “break down” words based on their roots and etymology — the “study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed” throughout the years. What’s more, in recent years the Scripps Bee has added a written spelling and vocabulary test in the first rounds of the Bee and the scores from that test are added to points awarded for words spelt correctly during on-stage performances.
In 2018, Scripps National Spelling Bee introduced the RSVBee invitation-only program in an effort “to open up the competition to kids who’ve had only limited access to the bee before, or no access at all.” Although The Bahamas did not take advantage of the opportunity to send more than one contestant to Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in 2019 The Bahamas entered three contestants, two of whom competed via RSVBee process.
BNSB 2019 Champion Roy Seligman, a 10-year-old 4th grade student at Lyford Cay International School, was joined by Yellow Elder Primary Kevin Williams, who finished second, and Queen’s College student Arjun Shetty, who finished third.
All three correctly spelt the words given to them during their on-stage appearances, but they did not do well enough in the written spelling and vocabulary test.
The 93rd Scripps National Spelling Bee will be held May 24-30 at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
