OSWALD BROWN WRITES
WASHINGTON, D. C., March 22, 2019 — Every year since it was introduced in 1998, the winner of the Bahamas National Spelling Bee (BNSB) has represented The Bahamas in the highly prestigious annual Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., but this year as a result of a new invitational program called RSVBee introduced by Scripps last year, an additional avenue has been created to allow jurisdictions to send two contestants to the Scripps National Bee.
Unless I missed seeing it in the news, the Ministry of Education and the BNSB Committee have yet to announce if The Bahamas will take advantage the opportunity to send a second contestant to this year’s Scripps Bee, 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 Sunday, March 10.
Most jurisdictions quickly responded to the RSVBee offer last year, 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 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.
I think it would be a shame if The Bahamas does not enter a second contestant in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will be held at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, near Washington, D. C., from May 27 – 30, 2019.
The ideal second contestant, of course, could be Kevin Williams, the 11-year-old Yellow Elder Primary student who finished second in this year’s BNSB finals. Actually, both Kevin and 13-year-old Arjun Shetty, an eighth-grader at Queen’s College who finished in third place, are headed to D.C. for the Scripps Bee, given the fact that a trip 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.
Kevin participated in the BNSB finals as the Western District of New Providence champion, so he already meets one of the stipulations of RSVBee that the second contestant must be a district champion from within jurisdiction. All that’s required now is to find a sponsor to cover the entrance fee if the Nassau Guardian, which is the principal corporate sponsor of the BNSB, decides not to sponsor a second contestant.
As the person responsible for introducing the Scripps National Spelling Bee to The Bahamas when I was Editor of the Nassau Guardian, 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.
Wouldn’t it be great if this year The Bahamas matches Jody-Anne Maxwell’s acccomplishment two decades ago? Surely, we’ll stand a better chance if we send two contestants.
