“You are witnessing history here in ERHS”, Junior Mark Mitchell, the new National English Honor Society (NEHS) president, announced at the beginning of the event. The school-wide Spelling Bee, hosted by NEHS on April 24, 2024, garnered more than 30 contestants. With three levels in the competition, ranging the words from easy to medium to hard, the winner received the final prize of $100.
After three rounds from easy-medium-hard words, Omar Pierre, a sophomore, won this year’s Spelling Bee. “I went into it with the mindset of just wanting to make it to the third round,” Pierre claims. But his final word, “effervescence,” won the tight three-round battle of hard words between him and the second runner-up. “I don’t think it had clicked in my mind yet that I had won at the time,” Pierre shares his initial thoughts when he won, but “I was pretty happy about it though.”
Junior David Blaufuss, the second runner-up, expressed he has “never done [Spelling Bee] before and it always interested [him.].” Even being placed second, “I thought that I was doing better than expected, and was happy that I got so far.” “Connoisseur” was his final word, a hard-level word on the event. In the end, Blaufuss mentions he enjoyed participating in this event a lot.
One of the people who didn’t make it to the final round was Senior Abigail Phillips, as they only reached the second level of the competition. Phillips expressed how they “enjoyed that everyone was very supportive of each other, whether they got it correct or not.” Their second word, “Melancholic” was misspelled but “I’ll definitely remember how to spell it now,” Phillips sheds light on it.
Junior Mark Mitchell, mentions how this event came to light by connecting the dots that since “so many students were interested in the Roosevelt math competition, we [NEHS] thought we could get a good turnout for a spelling bee.”
But after the positive turnout of this competition, Mitchell believes that “ this event was a great foundation, but a future spelling bee could be much improved.” Even Pierre, Blaufuss, and Phillips expressed their hopes for another spelling bee next year!
