By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., Is The Bahamas participating in the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee? After seeing a recent press release earlier this month from Scripps National Spelling in which The Bahamas was not mentioned as one of the foreign countries participating in this year’s Scripps Bee, I posed this question via inbox on Facebook to several top officials of the Ministry of Education and Technical and Vocational Training and did not get a response.
As the person responsible for introducing this highly acclaimed educational program to The Bahamas when I was editor of the Nassau Guardian in 1998, I shall be highly disappointed if The Bahamas does not have a contestant in the 95th Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will be held May 30 to June 1, 2023, at the Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Bee was cancelled in 2020, but was held in a mostly virtual format in 2021, with the finals, which featured 11 spellers, held in-person at ESPN Wide World of Sports near Orlando in order to facilitate pandemic-related safety protocols. The 2022 competition marked a return to the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center.
In both 2021 and 2022, The Bahamas was well represented by national champion Roy Seligman, student at Lyford Cay International School, and in 2022 he made it to the finals and finished in 23rd overall among the 234 spellers who participated in the Bee that year.
In previous years, qualifying competitions for spellers seeking to compete in the Bahamas National Spelling Bee, traditionally held in March, would be held in schools throughout The Bahamas, but there has been little activity in that regard, a fact that also seems to suggest that The Bahamas may not be represented in this year’s Scripps Bee.
Clearly, the powers-that-be should public state if this is indeed that case and the Bahamian people need to be given an explanation as to why such a decision was reached, if this is indeed the case.
The first Bahamas National Spelling Bee (BNSB) held in 1998 to select a Bahamas Spelling Champion to participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. that year was sponsored by The Nassau Guardian, which was the principal sponsor over the years. If The Guardian has decided not to be involved this year, then the public needs to know why it has decided to withdraw its support for the BNSB.
Although I often tend to take sole credit for introducing the Scripps National Speng Bee to The Bahamas, the contributions made by Mr. Dion Foulkes and several others towards my efforts to do were equally as important.
I had previously lived in Washington, D.C., for 21 years before returning to The Bahamas “permanently” in 1996, and for more than 10 years, I was New 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 The Bahamas started competing in the Scripps Bee, our spelling champion did exceptionally well, but none of them advanced to the finals before Roy Seligman in 2022. I was convinced, and still am, 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.
During the early years after the Scripps Bee was introduced in The Bahamas, I suggested that the Ministry of Education establish Spelling Bee Clubs in schools in the country and schedule competitions among schools throughout the year in the same manner that sports competitions are held. This is still a good idea and I hope that if they have not decided to stop participating in the Scripps Bee, the powers-that-be at the Ministry of Education and Technical and Vocational Training would give serious consideration to this proposition.
