Fifth-grader wins Herald’s Broward Spelling Bee
Jasmine Perez’s head was hurting from thinking so hard about some of the words that the judges were throwing her way toward the end of the spelling bee; words such as “remanence” and “umbellet.”
“I had never heard those words before,” said the 10-year-old fifth-grader from Bayview Elementary, a public school in Fort Lauderdale.
As she was on stage at the 84th Miami Herald Spelling Bee for Broward, she wrung her hands together, scrunched her eyebrows and took deep breaths.
She asked for definitions, sentences and origins. Still, she misspelled all of them.
Luckily, because the other finalist had also misspelled words, Jasmine stayed in the running. That went on for six rounds until finally, Jasmine got a breakthrough: “huckleberry.”
She figured out the “ck” immediately, she said, because she knows words that sound like “huckle.”
“And then berry. Everyone knows how to spell berry,” she added.
Then she got her championship word, the last word that contestants must spell correctly before officially winning a spelling bee: “merriment.”
She thought of “Merry Christmas,” she said, but the “y” didn’t quite fit in there.
After a few seconds of silent debate, she chose the “i” and with that, she won on Thursday. She will now represent her county in the national Scripps Spelling Bee, a televised event that will take place from May 26 to June 1 in Maryland.
The Miami Herald and other sponsors organize two spelling bees every year, one for Miami-Dade and Monroe students and another for Broward students.
Camila Sanchez-Izquierdo, an eighth-grade student at Highpoint Academy, a private K-8 school in Miami-Dade, won the bee for Monroe and Miami-Dade on Wednesday and will also go to the national competition.
Jasmine and Camila will both compete against hundreds of other spellers from across the United States and other countries. Last year, the national winner received $50,000 in cash, a medal and the pastel-colored Scripps Cup.
SHOCK, EXCITEMENT AND TEARS
When she heard she won on Thursday, Jasmine looked ahead, stoic. She returned to her seat and shook hands with the other finalist, Anvita Narasimhan, a sixth-grader from American Heritage School, a private school with various campuses in Broward.
“I was happy, but I was confused,” Jasmine said. “Because it had gone on for so long, I wasn’t sure I had won. I didn’t believe it. I thought there was going to be more.”
From the audience, her mother, Neisy Mirabal, was watching her and tearing up.
“I was excited,” Mirabal said. “I’m so proud of her. She was doubting herself but I told her, like I always tell her, whatever you set your mind to, you can achieve. I told her, ‘Come on, you got this.’ ”
It’s true, Jasmine said, going into it, she thought she would be the first one out of the bee, which was held at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
Jasmine said she practiced every day but believes reading helped her the most. She favors fantasy books and is reading “Keeper of the Lost Cities” by Shannon Messenger.
Alex Mena, the executive editor of the Miami Herald, told all contestants this week that they’re all champions.
“You have already shown you’re the best of your classrooms, grades and schools in South Florida,” he said. “You and your family should be very proud.”
Anvita won second place. Stefano Carpio, an eighth-grader at Nativity Catholic School, finished third after misspelling “dyscalculia,” a word that prompted an audience member to exclaim, “Whaaat?”, after the pronouncer said it.
13 ROUNDS
The bee lasted for 13 rounds, or about two hours. It started with 23 participants who had qualified by besting everyone at their schools and then scoring high on an online test.
Four kids lost in the first round.
At the start of the fourth round, when 14 spellers remained on stage, the judges dropped the study list that the spellers had received in advance and started using the 472,000 words in the MerriamWebster Dictionary.
By round 7, only the three remained.
Thursday’s judges were Alana Kaplan, the mother of Simone Kaplan, a threetime Miami Herald Spelling Bee winner and a runner-up at the National Scripps Spelling Bee in 2019; Heidi Carr, program director of undergraduate public relations at the University of Miami and a former Miami Herald editor; and Debbie Christie, a longtime Herald Spelling Bee volunteer.
Juan Rondeau, a 15year-old Westminster Christian School ninthgrader who won last year’s bee for Miami-Dade and Monroe for the third time in a row, joined the panel as the assistant judge.
Simone Kaplan pronounced the words for the spellers.