Corona student wins second bee in a row
Avijeet Randhawa earns family’s eighth county trophy in eight years
Make it eight spelling bee crowns in a row for Corona’s Randhawa family.
Avijeet Randhawa captured a second consecutive Riverside County Spelling Bee trophy Thursday.
The Auburndale Intermediate School eighth grader is the latest Randhawa to spell his way to the championship.
His older sisters, Lara and Aisha, each dominated the county bee, with Lara winning the 2021 and 2022 titles and Aisha winning in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
The 2020 bee was canceled because of the pandemic.
In Thursday’s threehour match in downtown Riverside, Avijeet correctly spelled “crescendo” in round 19 to claim victory. He will now move to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Maryland from May 28-30.
“I’ve been getting up at 4:30 a.m. every morning and studying for five to seven hours every day for the last few months in preparation for this event,” Avijeet said in a Riverside County Office of Education news release. “I’m just going to keep my fingers crossed as I go to the national competition.”
The runner-up was Victoria Michael-Taiwo, a fifth grader at Tuscany Hills Elementary School in Lake Elsinore.
Riverside County’s 46th annual bee featured 27 elementary and middle school students from public, charter and private schools.
It follows the San Bernardino County Spelling Bee, which sent two Etiwanda schools students to the national bee.
The co-champions are both from the Etiwanda School District: Shrey Parikh, of Day Creek Intermediate
School in Rancho Cucamonga, and Srikanth Satheesh Kumar, who attends Heritage Intermediate School in Fontana.
Shrey, a sixth-grader, correctly spelled the word “rarefaction” to secure victory in the March 13 contest at San Bernardino Valley College, a news release states.
Srikanth, an eighth grader, became co-champion after correctly spelling “recrudescent,” the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools reported.