Ninety-one Oakland County public, private and parochial school students are preparing to compete in the 19th Annual Oakland Press Regional Spelling Bee Sunday, Feb. 9.
THIS EVENT WILL ALSO APPEAR ON COMCAST CN900 TELEVISION – PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR THE ANNOUCEMENT OF AN AIRDATE.
This year again, Oakland Press online readers will be able to watch the entire spelling bee in progress on www.theoaklandpress.com. The spelling competition that starts at 1 p.m. will be livestreamed from Oakland Schools building, on Pontiac Lake Road west of Telegraph and north of Summit Place Mall.
The winner of the Oakland Press bee will win first place trophy and a free trip to Washington D.C. to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee during Bee Week 2014 from May 25–May 31.
Somewhere around 275 students from the United States, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Department of Defense Schools in Europe; also, the Bahamas, Canada, China, Ghana, Jamaica, Japan and South Korea will compete to be national champion speller. To compete students must not be older than 15 nor graduated from eighth grade.
To win, spellers have to correctly spell the word missed by the second-place student, then correctly spell the next word.
The first spelling bee was held in 1925, when Frank Neuhauser, sponsored by the Louisville Courier-Journal in Louisville KY, won with the final word “gladiolus.”
Last year’s spelling bee winner was Arvind Mahankali, sponsored by the Daily News in New York, who won with the word “knaidel.”
The only winner from Michigan was Louis Edward Sissman, sponsored by the Detroit News in 1941. He correctly spelled the final word “initials.”