Galvin Middle School Student Competes in 2011 Comcast South Shore Regional Spelling Bee

In Round 11, it was “Backstein” cheese that stumped Courtland Priest in this year’s Comcast South Shore Regional Spelling Bee.

Priest, a seventh grader who won last year’s regional Bee, was one of 23 students to compete in this year’s event held at Lombardo’s function facility in Randolph on Saturday.

“It was nerve-wracking but fun,” said 12-year-old Priest, after the two-plus-hour competition. “The best part about the Bee was the competition and what happens when you’re actually on stage. The competition was really stiff…I liked it.”

Priest’s words included layette, albatross, plateau, herbivore, analysis, castanets, asterisk, credenza, pitchblende, angst and Backstein.

“Part of this is the luck of the word that you get,” said Priest’s mother Elisa Blanchard, saying the best way to prepare for the Bee is to memorize the 18-page spelling list put out by Scripps National Spelling Bee.  “He’s clearly a gifted speller, and he does very well in school. He has a huge variety of interests so he’s reading about aeronautics and history and a lot of fantasy, so I think part of it is that he reads very widely.”

The Bee went 26 rounds in two hours and ten minutes, and was ultimately won by Surabhi Iyer, a sixth grader at the Ben Franklin Classical Charter School in Franklin, who won a $100 savings bond, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, a one-year subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica Online and an all-expense-paid six-day trip to Washington, DC, to compete in the National Spelling Bee.

“It was a really great event,” said Blanchard, recalling Priest’s experience at Nationals last year. She noted that the first round at the national level is a computer competition, followed by two words on stage, then a large elimination round based on cumulative points. “The kids really enjoyed each other. There was a huge sense of camaraderie – it was kind of like the kids against the words.”

Second place on Saturday was won by Matthew Donohue, a sixth grader at Kingston Intermediate School, who won a $50 (unidentified) gift card, a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate and a one-year subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Third place was won by Katarina Brown, an eighth grader who is home-schooled in Quincy, who won a $25 (unidentified) gift card, a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate and a one-year subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

South Shore students at Saturday’s competition represented Braintree, Canton, Franklin, Halifax, Hanover, Hanson, Hingham, Holbrook, Kingston, Medfield, Norton, Norwell, Norwood, Plympton, Quincy, Rockland, Walpole, and Westwood.

The event was presented by Comcast and hosted by LIDO Consulting Group.

The 2011 Comcast South Shore Regional Spelling Bee can be seen through Comcast’s On Demand feature starting next week.

According to http://myspellit.com/spellingbee.html, the National Spelling Bee started in 1925 and Scripps acquired the rights to the program in 1942. Of the 86 National Spelling Bee champions, 45 have been girls and 41 have been boys. The 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee will involve more than 11 million students.