A Little Rock eighth-grader will get a second chance at the national spelling bee in Washington this summer after she won the state bee Saturday.
After nearly 4 1/2 hours and 25 rounds of competition, Chythanya Murali, 13, a student at Lisa Academy charter school, spelled “Jacuzzi” to win the Arkansas State Spelling Bee and advance to the 87th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee in May. Chythanya won the state bee last year, but stopped short at the national bee with a computerized portion officials introduced that year.
“I don’t have an expectation,” Chythanya said of her chances at the national levelthis year. “I’ll just try what I can.”
Chythanya beat out 55 other spellers in the 2014 state bee at the University of Central Arkansas campus Saturday. Second place went to Jackson Parker, a 13-year-old seventh-grader at Paragould Junior High School, and in third place was Sam Bishop, a fifth-grader at St. Joseph Catholic School in Fayetteville. Sam’s age was unavailable Saturday afternoon.
About 300 people watched as third- to eighth-graders took to the stand to spell out more than 300 words, event coordinator Alyssa Caparaso said. The spellers exceeded the first Scripps-distributed spelling list, which had about 300 words, and went onto a secondary list, she said. In between turns, spellers stood with shaky knees. At the microphone, some looked up, while others spelled out the word on their hands.
As the number of contestants began dwindling, spellers gave one another thumbs-up signs and high-fives when difficult words were spelled correctly. This year’s state bee included an oral vocabulary round, similar to what the national competition instituted last year. In those rounds, the pronouncer gave spellers a word and two options for its definition. The round eliminated only three spellers.
Those were the very tests that didn’t allow Chythanya to advance to the semifinals in the national bee last year. She breezed through her words in the preliminary rounds of the national bee, but her score on the computer test, measuring spelling and vocabulary knowledge, wasn’t high enough.
The state winner said she had been competing in spelling bees since she was in fourth grade at Miss Selma’s Schools.
But the last couple of years have proved more difficult as Chythanya’s schoolwork has increased, her father, Murali Elambilan said.
Among her normal homework assignments and school projects, Chythanya practiced her spelling in the school’s spelling-bee club, along with setting aside a couple of hours on weekdays and longer times during the weekends for drills with her parents.
“It’s fun, but it’s a lot of hard work, too,” Chythanya said. “It’s a lot of commitment and dedication.”
During each of her words, Chythanya asked for a definition, a sentence, the word’s origin and the part of the speech - a method she said she picked up from past state spelling-bee winner Esther Park.
“It’s so that no mishaps would occur,” she explained, adding that many times spellers get a word wrong because it was easily confused with another one. “It’s been a good practice.”
Saturday was a “happy occasion,” Chythanya said.
“I didn’t go too far [during the national bee last year],” she said. “It’s my last year.”
At the end of the competition, which is hosted and sponsored by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Chythanya shook hands and congratulated Jackson, the runner-up who had his first stab at the state bee Saturday. The two went head to head in five rounds.
“I thought [the competition] was pretty good,” Jackson said. “You could tell they practiced their words.”
He worked tirelessly with his grandmother spelling out words for an hour or two after school each day after his school’s spelling bee, said his mother, Melanie Parker. Paragould Junior High School’s spelling bee, which was originally scheduled for December, was postponed to just weeks before the county’s competition because of a gas leak and evacuation at the school. Nonetheless, Jackson said he would practice some 400 to 450 words a day, compile a list of the words he spelled incorrectly, then type them out and review them.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 13 on 03/02/2014