Sameera Hussain is a champion

For many years to come young spellers competing in the Tulare County Spelling Bee will have one champion to look up to: Sameera Hussain of Sequoia Middle School.

The daughter of Mohammed and Rehanna Hussain of Porterville accomplished something on Wednesday that future spellers can only dream of: She won her third consecutive county spelling championship.

The young lady with all the poise and intelligence of a much older person, is the first to ever win the county competition three times. She joined two others who were twotime winners last year.

Now, to put this in perspective, Miss Hussain won her first championship when she was in the sixth grade, then her second as a seventh grader and capped it all off with the championship in eighth grade. She did misspell one word along the way, in her first year, but remained in the competition because the only other speller remaining misspelled the word as well. In all, she made it through 57 rounds of competition.

She will now go on to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Maryland. It will be her third trip there and we wish her well.

Miss Hussain plans on attending Harmony Magnet Academy and enter the engineering pathways. There is little doubt she will excel there.

We also congratulate Yasoda Satpathy, another Sequoia Middle School eighth-grader, who finished in a tie for third this year. She finished second last year.

The two students are outstanding examples of what our local schools can produce and we wish them both well in the future. The whole community is proud of what they accomplished.