By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Roy Seligman, a 10-year-old 4th grade student at Lyford Cay International School, will 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, 2019.
Seligman won the right to represent The Bahamas in the prestigious annual spelling competition when he out spelled 23 other contestants in the finals of the 22nd annual Bahamas National Spelling Bee (BNSB) held in the Crown Ballroom of the Atlantis on Paradise Island in Nassau, Bahamas.
Kevin Williams, a student at Yellow Elder Primary, representing the Western District of New Providence, finished second, and Arjun Shetty, a 13-year-old Queen’s College Student, finished third.
All three top-place finishers will travel to Washington, D.C., at the end of May for the Scripps competition, and there is a strong likelihood that second-place finisher Williams will also be a contestant in the Scripps National Bee, as a result of a new invitational program called RSVBee that was introduced last year by the Scripps National Spelling Bee to allow jurisdictions to send two champion spellers to Scripps Bee.
All that’s required now is for the Bahamas National Spelling Bee Committee to find a sponsor for the second contestant, if the Ministry of Education and the Nassau Guardian, who are the principal sponsors of the BNSB, decide not to do so.
Although The Bahamas did not take advantage of the opportunity last year to send two contestants, many jurisdictions did, and as a result the number of participants in the 2018 Scripps 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.
Jamaica, for example, whose contestants have perennially performed well in the Scripps Bee, had two participants last year and will no doubt be represented by two spellers again this year. It is also worth noting that Jamaica has the distinction of being the first foreign country to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee when 12-year-old Jody-Anne Maxwell won the top prize in 1998, just one year after Jamaica began participating at the Scripps Bee in 1997.
