Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Battle Creek series.

BATTLE CREEK, MI — Spelling Bees are one of the few competitions where contestants age out after eighth grade. This never felt right for two Lakeview High School (LHS) students who had their time in the spotlight and want to give people of all ages the chance to compete in the longest-running word game.

On August 23 at 10 a.m., inside the LHS Blackbox Theater, a free Community Spelling Bee open to anyone in Calhoun County will be held. Participants will range from elementary school students to lifelong learners, says Emily Demlow, a LHS Junior and veteran speller who is coordinating the event with fellow veteran speller Hanish Chinpalapati, a senior at LHS, and Barb Galonsky, who has been volunteering since 2014 to prep students and organize these competitions with the school district.
Hanish and Emily were quick to jump in after Galonsky brought up the idea of a community spelling bee last year.

“Students in eighth grade age out of the Scripps National Spelling Bee (SNSB), and every single year they ask if there’s a Bee in high school,” Galonsky says. “There’s no formal process for this through Scripps. For years, we talked about maybe this could happen, then COVID hit and everything stopped, except Emily and Hanish continued to bring up this idea.”

The two of them, she says, created the perfect set of dynamics to make the August Bee happen. In Calhoun County, the Lakeview Middle School is the only school in Calhoun County that has students in grades 5-8 participating in the Scripps Spelling Bee.

CourtesyHanish Chinpalapati, a Lakeview High School senior, is helping to organize the Community Spelling Bee.“For me, it’s really just that after middle school, no one has the opportunity, and a lot of schools around the area don’t have access to Bees,” Hanish says. “We wanted to bring that to the community and bring the community together as well. Most of the time, activities that are done are separated by school district. The community Bee breaks barriers, and we thought it would be a great way to connect back to the community as an adult because they don’t have access to Bees.”

In this Bee, everyone from the youngest to the oldest will be in the same pot, Galonsky says.

“Everyone gets the same word list, which starts out easy and becomes progressively harder,” she says. “We are using the Scripps official word list, which is available on an app called Word Club. This is exactly the same list we use to prepare students for the regional spelling competition and rounds one and two of the national competition.”

Spellers who advance after these rounds in the national competition face words taken from the entire dictionary — no list.

CourtesyEmily DemrowEmily was one of these spellers. In 2023, she qualified for the Scripps competition as an eighth grader and made it through the quarterfinals before exiting the stage.
Leading up to Scripps, she did four years of competition while in middle school, and went on to spelling bees in which the top spellers in every grade competed against each other within their grade levels. The winners advance to a multi-state regional spelling competition with the end goal of competing in the Scripps Bee.

Emily says she did a lot of studying with Galonsky with a focus on word use and origin. Her spelling prowess, she says, is rooted in interests she developed at a young age.

“I had just really liked reading and vocabulary a lot,” she says. “Just knowing a lot of words from reading made me interested in spelling. I could compete with the knowledge I had.”

Hanish’s preparation for his appearance on the national stage was 80 percent focused on the Scripps word list and 20 percent on word origins. His competitive nature didn’t hurt.

“I’ve always been interested in writing. I’ve always been a decent speller,” he says. “I’m a super competitive person and a decent speller, pretty good compared to other people. I try harder to win.”
 
How Lakeview spells success

A Lakeview Middle School student has competed in the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2023 Scripps Bees, with Emily being the most current student to participate.

The Lakeview School District is sponsoring and providing funding for the August Bee, as well as providing resources and the Blackbox Theater at no charge, Galonsky says. There will be prizes for the winners. These are among the details she, Hanish, and Emily are working on.

The school district is on board with the Community Spelling Bee because of the opportunities it presents to students in schools throughout Calhoun County and community members of all ages, says Dr. William Patterson, Superintendent of the Lakeview School District.

“Hanish and Emily wanted to take this on and make it more of a community event. They would like to see students be able to continue to participate in spelling bees on a national level after eighth grade,” he says. “These competitions are important for kids who love words and etymology, who want to be involved in something. They don’t have to be an athlete or band kid to be involved in something at school.”

In addition to spellers who want to win spelling bees, Galonsky works with students who are interested in becoming better spellers. In 2013, she established a Spelling Club, which was originally designed as an opportunity for any Lakeview Middle School student to meet with her once a week to go over a Scripps-sanctioned word list and discuss strategies for competing.

The Spelling Club became a reality after two former spelling standouts and Lakeview students – Vikram Strander and Soham Desai — asked for it. Galonsky says she saw firsthand what happens when a student is unprepared when her daughter, now an adult, competed in a regional spelling bee and “didn’t do very well.”

“At the same time that year, we had two fifth-grade boys, Vikram and Soham, who really enjoyed the experience and the competition and enjoyed standing in front of a room full of people to spell words. My daughter had gone and been unprepared, and I had these two boys asking if we could do more,” Galonsky says. “I attribute the Spelling Club to them.”

Like that Spelling Club, the Community Spelling Bee is driven by the desire of past student-competitors to get other students and community members excited about another form of wordplay.

“This is completely and entirely because of the kids,” Galonsky says. “There’s just an eagerness for these kids to have an academic competition available to them.”
For more information or to register, click this LINK.