MES student top district speller for second year

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Maricopa Elementary School fifth-grader Cassandra Soliz is MUSD’s sixth annual spelling bee champ after correctly spelling “unforeseeable” and “nominative.”

Desert Wind Middle School sixth-grader Taylor Nanstiel stumbled on “unforeseeable” to become the second-place winner. Soliz needed to spell that word correctly and then one more.

Another Desert Wind student, seventh-grader Porter Jones, came in third. All three head to county competition Feb. 15 in Casa Grande.

Last year’s winner also was a Maricopa Elementary student. Lynniece Andrews took the top spot as a fourth-grader.

The top three spellers from the elementary and middle schools in the Maricopa Unified School District were eligible for the district spelling bee, with 19 competing Tuesday.

As an eighth-grader, Legacy Traditional School’s Maya Rhode won the Pinal County Spelling Bee last year.

Elijah Northern, a seventh-grader last year at Maricopa Wells Middle School, placed fifth in the county’s top 10, and fifth-grader Luke Stroschein from Pima Butte Elementary School was No. 10.

***ADVERTISEMENT***For a taste of what the spellers were faced with Tuesday, here are some of the words they misspelled: authoritative, commodity, disparage, quantitative, beguile, depravity and deodorant.

Here are words they conquered: chastise, obituary, exterminate, vantage, vernal, taboo and forensics.

MUSD school board president Torri Anderson was the pronouncer for the event.