Originally printed in the Toledo Blade
By: Stephen Zenner, The Blade
Stillness and a palpable silence laid heavily on the fifth through eighth graders onstage Saturday during The Blade’s 2022 Northwest Ohio Championship Spelling Bee.
Nineteen participants from schools and districts scattered across northwest Ohio from the Indiana border to Sandusky vied for the grand prize of an expenses-paid trip to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, Md., just outside Washington during Memorial Day week.
For just shy of two hours at the Owens Community College Center for Fine & Performing Arts, students spelled word after word, surviving barrages of meticulous spelling challenges in increasing difficulty until a number of rounds had offered up a winner.
Bailey Lang, a published writer, served as the bee’s pronouncer, or master of ceremonies, while Mike Pearson, the assistant managing editor of The Blade, and Diana Bush, executive director of TOLEDO Read for Literacy, judged the bee, dismissing incorrectly spelled words with the ringing of a bell.
“I think it’s a very nerve-wracking situation for a lot of kids,” said Heather Pacheco, The Blade’s events coordinator who coordinated the spelling bee. “They just want to be here, have fun and do well.”
That’s easier said than done for a winner-take-all gambit involving thousands of potential words for students who have not even entered high school.
A quick final round pitted Cara McIntosh, of Christian Home Educators of Paulding County, and Lainey Gardner, of Crestview Middle School in Convoy, Ohio. Cara received “inimical,” and the polite chime of the judges’ bell signaled her misspelling. Lainey then correctly spelled “conundrum” before being given the final word, “quotidian.”
The 13-year-old girl admitted afterward that she “was not expecting to” spell the exotic word correctly, but was happy to have won the competition.
“I had my mom read from a list and then I would try to spell it best I could,” Lainey said. “If I got it wrong, then she would have me spell it again until I got it right.”
