Wednesday, October 16, 2002
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Wednesday, October 16, 2002 |
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Fayette's National Merit semifinalists compete for scholarships Thirteen Fayette students are among the 16,000 nationwide who are now vying for some 8,000 merit scholarship awards totaling $30 million that are being offered through the National Merit Scholarship Program. More than 1.3 million juniors in over 20,000 U.S. high schools entered the 2003 National Merit Program by taking the 2001 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists includes the highest scoring entrants in each state who were designated semifinalists in numbers proportional to the state's percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors. Fayette's semifinalists are (Fayette County High) Jacob Lewin, (McIntosh High) Rebecca Ackman, Lauren Coffey, Victoria Fratto, Robert Huefner, Ryan Nigro, John Powers, Christopher Taylor, Masiray Koroma and Shauna Muellings, (Sandy Creek High) Savannah Solomon, and (Starr's Mill High) Caitlin Clarke and Lauren Kurczewski. The next step for semifinalists is to fulfill requirements to advance to finalist standing, a prerequisite to competing for a Merit Scholarship award. To become finalists, semifinalists must have a record of very high academic performance, be endorsed and recommended by their school principal and earn SAT scores that confirm their earlier qualifying test performance. About 90 percent, or approximately 15,000 semifinalists, are expected to advance to the finalist level of the competition and some 8,000 of them will win Merit Scholarship awards.
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