After six-round battle, fifth grader from Broward Public Schools wins Spelling Bee
Jasmine Perez’s head was hurting from thinking so hard about some of the words the judges were throwing her way toward the end of the spelling bee. Words like “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 contestants must spell correctly before officially winning a spelling bee: “merriment.”
Take a look: 2024 Miami Herald Spelling Bee in Broward
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 the Miami Herald Spelling Bee for Broward 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, along with other sponsors, organizes 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 Herald’s bee for Monroe and Miami-Dade on Wednesday, so she will also fly to Washington D.C.
Jasmine and Camila will both compete against hundreds of other spellers, also regional bee winners, from across the United States and other countries. Last year, the national winner got $50,000 in cash, a medal and the pastel-colored Scripps Cup.
Shock, excitement and tears after winning
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,” she 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, held at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in Fort Lauderdale.
Jasmine said she practiced every day but believes reading helped her the most. She favors fantasy books and is currently 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 already champions even if they didn’t make it to D.C.
“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.”
Narasimhan got second place. Stefano Carpio, an eighth grader at Nativity Catholic School, finished third, after misspelling “dyscalculia” in the eighth round, a word that prompted an audience member to exclaim, “Whaaat?” right after the pronouncer said it.
84th annual Miami Herald bee
The Broward 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 written 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 the spellers had received in advance and started using the 472,000 words in the bees’ official reference, the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In the first part of the bee, participants relied on memorization, then they had to use their phonetics skills.
By round 7, only the three finalists remained.
Thursday’s judges were Alana Kaplan, the mother of Simone Kaplan, a three-time Miami Herald Spelling Bee winner and runner up of 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 15-year-old ninth grader at Westminster Christian School 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.
