Qualifiers prepare for county spelling bee
By DIANE GASPER-O'BRIEN
Most participants in the Ellis County Spelling Bee attract a lot of family members to support them.
This year, Samantha and Clara Crawford's family will have double the chance to move on to the next level.
The 56th annual county bee is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Fort Hays Ballroom of Fort Hays State University's Memorial Union, and the winner will advance to the Sunflower Spelling Bee Regional Championship in Great Bend in March.
Sixth-grader Samantha Crawford was one of the four qualifiers from St. Mary Elementary School in Ellis, along with her younger sister, Clara, a fourth-grader.
It will be the first trip to the county finals for the siblings, who will compete against numerous other newcomers, along with several who have been there before.
One of those returnees will be Melissa Pfeifer, an eighth-grader at Kennedy Middle School who won last year's county title and will be trying to become the first back-to-back winner since 2003.
That year, another Kennedy eighth-grader, Julie Schmeidler, accomplished the feat after having won her first title in 2002.
The veterans of this year's list of contestants will be Alex Feyerherm and Eric Adams, both making their fourth trip to the county bee.
Feyerherm is a seventh-grader at Kennedy Middle School in Hays and will compete in the county finals for the fourth time in five years, having qualified in every year but one (last year) since third grade.
The highest returning finisher besides Pfeifer will be Eric Adams, a sixth-grader at Hays' Felten Middle School who tied for third last year. Adams had qualified his last three years at Wilson Elementary School, then again this year in his first year at Felten.
The youngest competitor will be Crystal Wilder, a second-grader at Washington Elementary School in Hays who already has shown she can compete with older students. She was the top speller out of her school.