By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the sponsor of the District of Columbia Spelling Bee to select a D.C. spelling champion to participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the Washington Informer ran a full-page advertisement in this week’s edition that could be used as promotional support by The Bahamas National Spelling Bee Committee in its efforts to find a corporate sponsor for the second Spelling Bee contestant that The Bahamas can now enter in the 2019 Scripps Bee.
The Informer full-page ad, which I have reproduced to accompany this article, lists 10 major corporate sponsors for its 37th Annual Spelling Bee, which will be aired on NBC-4 on April 7, 2019.
In addition to the winner of The Bahamas National Spelling Bee (BNSB), which will be held this Sunday, March 10, in the Crown Ballroom of Atlantis on Paradise Island, a new invitational program called RSVBee was introduced last year by the Scripps National Spelling Bee to allow jurisdictions to send two champion spellers to the prestigious spelling competition.
Although The Bahamas did not take advantage of the opportunity last year, many jurisdictions did, and 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 last year’s Scripps Bee. Out of the 519 spellers, 241 became contestants via RSVBee, including the overall winner Karthik Nemmani, 14, of McKinney, Texas.
Finding a corporate sponsor or an individual who can afford to sponsor a second Bahamian contestant in the Scripps Bee should not be too difficult. Surely, someone like Adrian Fox — the nouveau riche co-owner of Island Luck numbers establishment, who reportedly is “sparing no expense” to see the upcoming Buju Banton reggae concert — could be encouraged to cover the costs of sending a second contestant to Washington, D.C.
As the individual responsible for introducing the Scripps National Spelling Bee to The Bahamas in 1998 when he was Editor of the Nassau Guardian, with strong support from the then Minister of State for Education Dion Foulkes, my overwhelming support for this very important educational initiative has remained rock-solid over the years.
The Washington Informer, where I worked as News Editor for more than 12 years in the 1980s and early 1990s, began sponsoring the District-wide spelling bee during the 1981-82 school year after the then sponsor, The Washington Daily News, was sold and eventually closed, leaving he D.C. Spelling Bee without a sponsor.
The late Dr. Calvin W. Rolark, Sr., founder of The Washington Informer and one of the unsung heroes of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, applied for and won the right for his weekly publication to take over as the sponsor of the bee.
I attended by first Scripps Spelling Bee in 1984 and was so impressed that I made up my mind that whenever I returned to The Bahamas to live, I would seek to have the Scripps Bee inculcated into our education system.
I initially returned to The Bahamas in 1993, but after editing the Freeport News for a year, I returned go D.C. for personal reasons. In 1996 when I returned to The Bahamas permanently and again became Editor of the Freeport News, I suggested to Kenneth “Six” Francis — the then Publisher and General Manager of the Nassau Guardian, which still owns the Freeport News — that we should seek permission to sponsor a Bahamian speller in the Scripps Bee. At the time, newspapers were the main sponsors of Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants.
Mr. Francis was strongly supportive of my proposal and when I was transferred to Nassau as Editor of The Guardian, we submitted an application to the Scripps National Spelling Bee Committee, with the full support of the Ministry of Education. Our first Bahamas National Spelling Bee was held in 1998, and the winner was Dominique Higgins, a 12-year-old Jordan Prince William High student, who performed exceptionally well in the Scripps competition, but did not advance to the finals.
That happens to be the same year that Jamaica’s Jody-Anne Maxwell, at the age of 12, became the first non-America to win Scripps National Spelling Bee, just one year after Jamaica began participating at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1997.
Jamaican spellers were perennially among the top spellers in subsequent years, thanks to legendary national spelling bee coach Rev. Glen Archer, who died in February of 2015.
Based on Rev. Archer’s success, I have always advocated that The Bahamas should have a national coach and introduce Spelling Bee Clubs in our schools. It is still an idea that I think Minister of Education Jeff Lloyd should fully support.
As I noted in a post on Friday, to their credit, organizers of the 22nd annual Bahamas National Spelling Bee have structured this year’s competition using a similar format as the Scripps National Spelling Bee, in which contestants participate in preliminary rounds that include written and vocabulary tests.
The 24 spelling finalists in this year’s BNSB participated in preliminary Rounds 1, 2 and 3 Friday in the Prince of Wales Ballroom of Atlantis at Paradise Island, and according to the program, Rounds 1 and 2 were designated for “Written Spelling and Vocabulary A&B” and Round 3 was for “Oral Vocabulary”.
Presumably, performances by contestants in the preliminary rounds will be factored into their performance on stage on Sunday when an overall winner and, hopefully, a second contestant will be chosen to represent The Bahamas in the 92nd annual Scripps National Spelling Bee at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, near Washington, .D.C., from May 27 – 30.
