A few interesting facts about the 89th Bee, which gets under way Wednesday morning.
By Raif Karerat
The preliminary rounds of the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee is set to begin at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC, Wednesday morning.
Here are a few interesting facts about the 89th Bee:
- There are 285 registered spellers enrolled in the competition, with 144 boys and 141 girls representing a near fifty-fifty gender dichotomy.
- The majority of the spellers are in the eighth grade, with 126 of them enrolled in the competition (44.2 percent), followed by 87 seventh graders (30.5 percent), 36 sixth graders (12.6 percent), 28 from the fifth grade (9.8 percent), five fourth graders (1.8 percent), no third graders, two second graders (0.7 percent), and a lone student from the first grade (0.4 percent).
- Of the registered participants, 190 are from public schools (66.6 percent), 53 attend private institutions (18.6 percent), 21 are home-schooled (7.4 percent), 17 are parochial (5.9 percent), and 3 students attend charter schools (1.1 percent) while 1 of the contestants receives a virtual education (0.4 percent).
- Meanwhile, 29 spellers have relatives who have participated in a combined 67 Scripps National Spelling Bees throughout the years.
- A few South Asian American dynasties are also present at the 2016 iteration of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Contestant Dhiyana Mishra’s sister took second place in 2012, while two of this year’s entrants — Jairam Hathwar and Srinath Mahankali — have siblings who formerly lifted the first-place trophy after out-spelling their respective peers.
- As The American Bazaar reported on Monday, more than 60 spellers — over a fifth of the contestants — this year are Indian Americans, winners of the past eight Spelling Bees.
The nation’s largest and longest-running educational promotion, administered on a not-for-profit basis by The E.W. Scripps Company, was founded in 1925 in order to help students improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn concepts, and develop correct English usage.
While the program experienced incremental growth between the 1920s and the 1970s, the number of participants doubled between 1980 and 1990; in recent years the program underwent a second growth spurt — and a significant surge in popularity — due to live coverage on the far-reaching ESPN television channel.