St. Regis kids compete in annual spelling bee

Nick Ianniello

Mineral Independent

Student from St. Regis School gathered in the St. Regis Gymnasium Wednesday afternoon for an opportunity to show their stuff in the school’s annual spelling bee.

“I was really proud of them and some of those students got some pretty tough words,” said event organize Diane Gingerich.

Gingerich, who has been working with the spelling bee for seven years now, said that she was impressed with the performance of the youngsters and thought that this year’s bee was a success.

The spelling bee, which serves as an elimination round for the Mineral County Spelling Bee that will take place in March, is an annual event that students study to compete in every year.

Students from fifth through eighth grades compete in the bee and the top four students from each grade get to go on to compete in the county spelling bee.

This year the Mineral County Spelling Bee will be held in St. Regis on March 11 at 7 p.m.

“It’s really important to these kids that they be supported,” said Gingerich, encouraging parents to help their children study and prepare for the county spelling bee.

The top two finishers from Wednesday’s spelling bee will receive a year-long subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

All of the students who participated got a certificate of participation and a pencil. Students who made it past the second round of competition also got a homemade bee-shaped pencil topper.

Students involved in the spelling bee had to follow rules set out by and spell words taken from a wordlist provided by the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Bernie Patterson served as the pronouncer for the event, reading the words to each student and providing them with definitions, sentence usage, part of speech, language origin and alternate pronunciations.

Patterson also informed students if the word to be spelled was an homonym and which spelling of the word was to be used.

Gingerich, along with Cori Miranda and Shelli Martineau, judged the event, providing final calls on whether or not a word was spelled correctly.

Although the situation did not arise, had a parent or teacher felt that a student had been disqualified unfairly when they had spelled the word correctly, they could challenge the judge’s ruling. The judges would then look over their decision again to ensure that the spelling bee had been properly officiated over.

When a speller misspelled a word, they were removed from the competition. However, if every speller in a round misspelled their word, all of the spellers from that round were brought back into the competition.

At the start of the competition there were 41 spellers. The first round eliminated all but 12 spellers and the second round left only five spellers to compete.

Brady Brantley, Samuel Cole, Bryton Coker, Damen Lucier and Riley Hollingsworth were the only spellers left going into the third round of spellings.

Brantley and Lucier survived the third round to become the top two competitors of the day.

After six more rounds of spelling Lucier finally bested Brantley when he correctly spelled both extravaganza and apostrophe.

“It was pretty cool to win,” said Lucier “Just an awesome feeling.”

Lucier said that he did not study specifically for the spelling bee, but he credited his teacher, Gingerich, and her weekly spelling lists for his success at the event.

“We have tons of words to learn to spell every week,” Lucier said.

He went on to say that he was impressed with Brantley’s spelling, and the looks on both competitor’s faces during the final rounds showed that the two were unsure of whether or not they would win the event.

“The anticipation was pretty crazy,” Lucier said.

Teachers, parents and administrators from St. Regis School came down to watch students test their spelling mettle and congratulate the school’s new spelling champion.

“It’s always good when parents can come down and support us, and it’s especially nice when the administration can come down for an event like this,” Gingerich said.

The qualifiers for the Mineral County Spelling Bee from St. Regis are fifth graders Coker, Cody Blank, Maddi Pugh, Pilar Cantrell-Field, sixth graders Brantly, Hollingsworth, Cheyenne Yearout, Andrew Managhan, seventh graders Lucier, Cole, Andrew Haas, Jarrod Tippens and eighth graders Spur Hill, Ronnie Graham, Cody Raisor, Allison Davids.