Ten middle school students competed Feb. 7 for the right to represent Lincoln County at the statewide Scripps Spelling Bee, part of the nation’s largest and longest-running educational promotion.
The winner was Great Salt Bay eighth grader Christine Hilton, with classmate Jacob Brown in second place.
Students and enthusiastic family members assembled in the Great Salt Bay School gymnasium where moderator and GSB sixth grade teacher Elizabeth Norton explained the rules for the competition.
Spellers were told each word would be announced and spoken in a sentence. They were permitted to request a definition or language of origin and were told they must state whether the first letter of a proper noun was to be capitalized.
Competitors were eliminated after misspelling one word. In the final round, the winning speller would be the student who correctly spelled two consecutive words after all others had been eliminated.
Competing in the county bee were: Medomak Middle School – Courtney Day, seventh grade, and Noah Munn, seventh grade; Jefferson Village School – Nathan McIvor, eighth grade and Joseph Cleaves, seventh grade; Edgecomb Eddy School – Allyson Barter, sixth grade; Great Salt Bay School – Jacob Brown, eighth grade and Christine Hilton, eighth grade; Bristol School – Jayden Gilbert, fifth grade and Kayleigh Brisard, fifth grade; and South Bristol School – Samantha Lakin, sixth grade.
It took four rounds of competition to narrow the field to the final pair. Competitors stumbled over such words as caboose, finale and soviet.
Hilton and Brown went back and forth 10 times in the final head-to-head, facing challenges such as igneous and isobar, before Brown misspelled trawl and Hilton successfully spelled homonym and popularity to win the bee.
Second-place competitor Brown will take Hilton’s place if, for any reason, she is unable to take part in remaining competition.
The Lincoln County event was recorded for LCTV, Channel 7.
The bee is administered on a not-for-profit basis by The E.W. Scripps Company and local spelling bee sponsors. The state bee will be held Saturday, March 30 in Portland. National finals will take place Tuesday-Thursday, May 28-May 30 in the Washington, D.C. area.
