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Speller knocked out of Bee
By Denise Dick
Competition is stiff at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and Jackson-Milton Middle School’s Ryan Staton was among those knocked out by the first spelling word.
Ryan, 14, who won The Vindicator Regional Spelling Bee in March, misspelled “ceraceous.”
“It was one of the words I studied, but I had trouble with it,” Ryan said in a telephone interview Wednesday at the contest in National Harbor, Md. The Bee is staged in the Maryland Ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center.
“Ceraceous” is a medical term that means resembling wax, according to the Bee’s website.
Ryan is one of 285 spellers — 144 boys and 141 girls.
“It was pretty tough,” he said of the competition. “There were only about 30 misses in the first round. There are still 250 left.”
By the end of the day, the field was cut to 45 spellers for today’s finals.
As part of Ryan’s winnings, The Vindicator paid for his trip and for a parent to the Bee.
It marked Ryan’s first visit to Washington, D.C.
“Yesterday we saw the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Memorial,” he said.
He enjoyed the tour.
“It was really fun,” Ryan said. “You never think about how big it is until you see it.”
The family plans excursions to some other sites in and around the nation’s capital. He may take in some of the Bee’s final round on ESPN today though.
The competition includes public, private, parochial, charter, virtual and home- school students. The majority, nearly 70 percent, are from public schools.
Ryan, 14, a son of Kelly and Edward Staton of Lake Milton, met a lot of his fellow spellers, particularly others from Ohio during events leading up to Wednesday’s rounds.
All contestants complete a computer test as in the preliminary rounds. It gauges their word knowledge in both spelling and definitions.
All contestants take their turn spelling live on the stage regardless of their performance on the computer test.
Ryan’s March entry into The Vindicator Bee marked his second appearance at the regional contest. He outspelled all of his schoolmates in 2015 to compete at the larger contest where he placed third.