Two Hempfield School District students will participate in the WITF (PBS Channel 33) Central PA Grand Championship Spelling Bee.

Devonah Mahesh Nithya, a sixth-grader at Landisville Intermediate Center (LIC), and eighth-grader TJ Young of Centerville Middle School will compete on Saturday, March 15, at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology.

Devonah and TJ will take part in the bee alongside the top 33 spellers in the region, which encompasses Lancaster, Cumberland, York, and Lebanon counties.

The champion will advance to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to Thursday, May 27 to 29.

Bethany Eaton, an instructional support teacher at LIC, coordinates the district's spelling bees. "I am very thankful," Eaton said. "I have coordinators in each of our elementary buildings and our two middle schools who volunteer to run the bees in their buildings. We provide the students with lists that come from Scripps, then the buildings can decide how they want to run the bee. Some buildings do a written spelling bee, and some do an oral spelling bee like you might see on TV."

Eaton said all of Hempfield's buildings are large enough that each can send its top four finishers to the next level.

Landisville Intermediate Center holds an oral spelling bee to determine which students advance to the next round. Students interested in participating take part in a written bee for round one. According to Eaton, 235 of 475 LIC students competed in round one of the bee.

Eaton scores the tests, and between 24 and 27 spellers move on based on the cutoff score. They have a month to prepare for the oral bee. LIC's bee was held Nov. 25, 2024, in the school's large group instruction room and livestreamed to classrooms and on YouTube for family members who could not attend in person.

LIC's spelling bee was a classic, lasting a school-record four hours and 15 minutes. The bee had to stop for lunch before concluding 15 minutes before it would have ended in a tie between Devonah and her friend Emma Sasso. "My jaw hurt a little bit after spelling so many words," Devonah said.

Emma won the building title for the second time, having also prevailed as a fourth-grader while Devonah won last year.

Both Emma and Devonah advanced to the next round, an online test students needed to take between Jan. 16 and 20. "It felt good," said Devonah. "That's what I was aiming for."

The online test was for both spelling and vocabulary, and the top 35 of the 200 participants moved on to the Central PA Spelling Bee. Devonah, who also enjoys reading, said she spent between 30 minutes and an hour per day with her mother, Nithya Mahesh, and father, Mahesh Mariadoss, preparing for the bee and plans on studying even more for the next round.

TJ won the Centerville Middle School oral bee on Dec. 3, 2024. When he headed to school, he had no idea the bee was going to be held that day. "It was a little stressful," said TJ. "I didn't do much studying until the day of because I didn't know it was that day. ... I thought it was on Dec. 11. I just studied the words at lunch, and that was the page they mostly used."

Despite the short notice, TJ noted the school bee was not that difficult. "Here it was pretty easy," he said. "I knew most of the words they were asking me, so I didn't have any struggles. I had seen other people struggle with words I wouldn't have struggled with. It was pretty easy to sum it up."

TJ studied between 20 to 30 minutes per day with parents Jo and Steve to prepare for the next round. "I knew I needed to study a lot because I was spelling difficult words," said TJ.

The online test was tougher than he had envisioned. "I was decently confident, and then I realized I should not have been that confident," said TJ. "It was a very hard test. It was 50 questions, and I got a 39, so it was decently hard."

He knows he needs to ramp up studying for the Central PA Spelling Bee. "I have time, and I'm going to take my time, look through the words, and memorize them because I would like to get past the regional round."

TJ, who enjoys playing his banjo and guitar and doing genealogy research on his family and for others who request it, credits his English teacher Marie Bolettieri with inspiring him to participate in the school bee.