By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 11, 2019 – The Bahamas will be represented by two spellers in the 92nd annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will be held at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbour, Maryland, near Washington, D. C., from May 27 – 30, 2019.
According to a reliable source, in addition to Roy Seligman — the 10-year-old Lyford Cay International School student who won the 22nd annual Bahamas National Spelling Bee championship held sat Atlantis on Paradise Island on March 10 – The Bahamas will also be represented in the prestigious Scripps Spelling competition by Kevin Williams, the 11-year-old Yellow Elder Primary student who finished second in this year’s BNSB championship finals.
“Please note that Kevin Williams is actually representing the Bahamas in spelling bee in Washington as a participant,” the source said in a response sent to my Facebook inbox regarding a photo I published in BAHAMAS CHRONICE of a courtesy call Williams paid on the Most Hon. Dame Marguerite Pindling, Governor General of The Bahamas, on Wednesday, March 10.
In the caption under the photo, it was noted that a trip to Washington for the Scripps Spelling Bee was one of the prizes won by Williams by virtue of finishing second. The source said that the Principal of Yellow Elder “has done a tremendous fund-raising effort to get Kevin entered in the competition.” However, the source said Kevin really needs his coach to accompany him, and a fundraising campaign is currently underway to cover her expenses.
The fact that The Bahamas is eligible to enter two contestants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee is due to a new invitational program called RSVBee introduced by Scripps last year, creating an additional avenue to allow jurisdictions to send two contestants to the Scripps National Bee.
Most jurisdictions quickly responded to the RSVBee offer last year, including Jamaica, which had two entrants in the 2018 Scripps Bee. As a result the number of participants in the 2018 Spelling Bee increased substantially from the 291 spellers who participated in 2017 to 519 contestants in the 2018 Scripps Bee. Out of the 519 spellers, 278 of them were from the traditional sponsorship programs and 241 competed through RSVBee, including the overall winner, 14-year-old Karthik Nemmani of McKinney, Texas.
Kevin participated in the BNSB finals as the Western District of New Providence champion, which qualified him to be entered in the Scripps Bee through the RSVBee process, given the fact that one of the stipulations of RSVBee is that the second contestant must be a district champion.
Both Kevin and 13-year-old Arjun Shetty, an eighth-grader at Queen’s College who finished in third place, each won a trip to D.C., based on the fact that a trip to Washington to observe the Scripps Bee has been one of the prizes won by the spellers placing second and third since the introduction of the Scripps Bee to The Bahamas.
Now that Kevin is a contestant in the Scripps Bee, having his coach accompany him is critical. Hopefully, the fundraising effort that is currently underway to cover her expenses will be hugely successful.
As the person responsible for introducing the Scripps National Spelling Bee to The Bahamas when I was Editor of the Nassau Guardian in 1998, I am absolutely elated that The Bahamas will now enter a second contestant in the Scripps Bee.
My passion and support for this very important educational program in our school system has not ebbed from when we received the good news back in 1997 that The Bahamas’ application to Scripps had been approved,
As I have noted on more than one occasion, I previously lived in Washington, D.C., for 21 years before returning to The Bahamas in 1996. 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 very impressed by its potential to have a tremendous impact on the educational system of The Bahamas. 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 current Minister of Labour 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.
