By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON,D.C. — The Bahamas National Spelling Bee Committee (BNSBC) missed a golden opportunity to enter two contestants from The Bahamas in the 91st annual Scripps National Spelling Bee that that will take place May 27 through June 1 at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
As a result of a new invitational program called RSVBee, a new path was created to allow jurisdictions to send two champion spellers to the Scripps National Bee. Whether officials of the BNSBC were aware of this initiative is a mystery, but they certainly should have been, given the fact that RSVBee was launched last December, almost three months before the BNSBC held its championship finals Sunday, March 18, 2018, at Atlantis, Paradise Island.
Considering that the top three winners in the BNSB championship battled for quite a long time before a champion emerged. It would have been great if the speller who eventually placed second, Shreya Meena, representing the Bahamas Association of Independent Schools (BAISS), could have joined first-place winner Johnathan Randall, the Eleuthera District champion, as representatives of The Bahamas in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. at the end of this month.
Many jurisdictions traditionally sending contestants to the Scripps National Spelling Bee were quick to respond to the introduction of the new program, and as a result the number of participants in the 2018 Spelling Bee has increased substantially from the 291 spellers who participated in 2017 to 519 contestants in this year’s Scripps Bee. Out of the 519 spellers, 278 of them are from the traditional sponsored programs and 241 are through RSVBee.
This is certainly something for officials of the BNSB to keep in mind when they start planning later this year for the 2019 Bahamas National Spelling Bee. For example, Jamaica now has two entrants in this year’s Scripps Bee: Nathaniel Stone, from May Pen, Clarendon, Jamaica, the
national champion sponsored by the Jamaica Gleaner, and Assana Thompson, a student at Ardenne High School in Kingston, who was accepted under the RSVBee program.
Among the 519 spellers, Bahamas champion Johnathan Randall, a 12-year-old Central Eleuthera High School student, is Speller No. 455. Sponsored by the Nassau Guardian, on the Scripps National Spelling Bee website featuring all the contestants, he says his favourite subject is math, his favourite food is lobster fettuccine and his favourite sport is fishing.
Because of the increased number of contestants, the Scripps Bee has been expanded this year. Preliminaries will be held on both Tuesday, May 29, and WednesBAday, May 30. Round 2 will be on Tuesday, 9:15 a.m. – 5:20 p.m.; Round 3, Wednesday, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.; and the Finals has been split in two parts on Thursday, May 31. Part 1 will be from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. and Part 2 from 8:30 – 10:30 p.m.
Participants in the Scripps Bee include spelling champions from across the United States, spelling champions from The Bahamas, Canada, the People’s Republic of China, Ghana, Japan, Jamaica, Mexico, and New Zealand also compete in the prestigious educational competition. It is also open to spelling champions from U.S. territories such as Guam, American Samoa, the Navajo Nation, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with overseas military bases in Germany and South Korea.
