After district spelling bee win, Mill Road's Jain set for regionals

When Mahi Jain told her family she had won Red Hook’s district-level spelling bee, they asked her how many people won.

“I said, ‘Only one,’” she said smiling. “They were super happy for me.”

It would be understandable if Mahi’s family thought there must be more than one winner. After all, she was a fifth-grade student in a Scripps National Spelling Bee district qualifying round open to every student in grades five through eight.

Soon, she’ll try again to be the one and only winner again when she takes part in a regional competition this month. The winner there advances to the Scripps final held in May – the one you’ve likely seen on national television.

Winning regionals, she said, “would feel like a big accomplishment.” She’s already accomplished a lot, as only the third fifth-grade student to win the district competition in Dr. Brian Boyd’s 18 years at Mill Road.

“I think the spelling bee is one of those things that is a really healthy competition that students work hard to prepare for. Mahi is a perfect example of that,” the Mill Road principal said. “She created flash cards over the holiday break and did a number of things with her family to prepare for it.”

The qualifiers began at the classroom level. All students received grade-appropriate word lists in late November and competitions were held in early December in Linden Avenue Middle School English classes and in the Mill Road fifth-grade classes. The top students competed in a school-wide competition to move forward, in which a much broader list of roughly 2,000 words were given to the students to study.

The district competition was held Jan. 3 at the high school Performing Arts Center and featured three winners from each of the four grade levels. Mahi’s teacher, Lisa Lloyd, said she expected Mahi to be one of Mill Road’s three – “she’s very bright. She always goes above and beyond, and always gives her best effort with everything.” – but Mahi herself didn’t think she could win against the older Red Hook students.

Mahi said the spelling bee was nerve-wracking, but said having a friend, fifth-grader Ivy Subbarao, up on stage with her, was calming. As her competitors gradually missed words and left the stage to sit in the audience, she started to get excited. “I was like, ‘Wow, I might actually win this,’” she said.

After 10 rounds of competition, Mahi won the district title on the word “annulment.”

She said she was confident when she heard the word. “I spent a lot of time starring at the list, so I knew it.”

Seventh-grader Marcus Stephenson finished as the alternate.

The regional competition will be virtual. Spelling individually, each qualifier will have 50 words to spell and the student who scores best moves on to the final, which is held in May just south of Washington D.C. The region encompasses nearly 150 school districts across much of New York. In the last roughly 35 years, two Red Hook students have made it that far.

Red Hook District finalists

5th Grade

Mahi Jain

Audrey Shen

Ivy Subbarao

6th Grade

Ava Brodsky

Lesia Nicolay

Solana Edelman

Riley Cerulo (first alternate)

Errol McMeekin (second alternate)

7th Grade

Marcus Stephenson

Isabella Piazza

Gianmarco Verrilli 

Iko Malikin (first alternate)

Drew Carter (second alternate)

8th Grade

Ted Carl

Thalia Rubin

Milo Haggard