The snowfall on Saturday morning, March 21 did nothing to chill the excitement at the Boston Centers for Youth and Family's (BCYF) Mildred Avenue facility as families, teachers and principals gathered to cheer on 24 young spelling champions from Boston Public Schools (BPS), charter and private schools and a homeschool co-op in the BCYF Spelling Bee. A fifth grader from the South End, Jian Han Wang, brought pride to his parents; his school, the Harvard/Kent School in Charlestown; and this neighborhood with his participation. Wang, who came to the US approximately three years ago with few words of English at his command, represented Charlestown's Harvard/Kent School in the spelling bee, whose winner will go on to the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Wang's remarkable rise from a Chinese-speaking new arrival to a high-achieving student in such a short time attests to his hard work, according to Harvard/Kent principal Jason Gallagher. Gallagher explained that Harvard/Kent draws many Chinese students because of its Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) program, which prepares Chinese-speaking students for general education classes. "Jian Han started at Harvard Kent in second grade. He is in the general ed fifth grade class and he is doing fantastic! Once they can read, write, speak, and listen proficiently, they go into the general program," Gallagher said in a telephone interview.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh offered his greetings at the beginning of the spelling bee and stayed for some of the competition before departing for a day of community service with Seattle mayor Ed Murray, who was visiting for a US Conference of Mayors meeting. Also attending were city councilors Tito Jackson and Charles Yancey and Boston chief of health and human services Felix G. Arroyo. Walsh told the audience, "These kids are all winners," and that sentiment was echoed by BCYF interim executive director Christopher Byner in reference to the fact that all of the children, who ranged from fourth to seventh grade, were the spelling champions of their schools.

Walsh and Byner presented each speller with a medal of participation and posed for photos with them before the competition, which ran about two hours and delivered some genuine drama and suspense. Emily Sun, a sixth grader from the Ohrenberger School in West Roxbury, struggled valiantly for almost ten minutes with the word "rapport". Asking for language of origin, the word in a sentence and definition repeatedly, Sun hesitantly began to spell the word several times before stopping, her anxiety palpable. Finally, Sun broke the nervous silence throughout the room by spelling the word correctly to loud applause and cheers. After 12 regular rounds, two competitors, Sun and Christy Jestin, a seventh grader at Boston Latin School from West Roxbury, spelled approximately twenty more times before Sun misspelled "galjoen", an Afrikaans-derived name for a type of fish, and Jestin correctly spelled "schottische", a dance of Bohemian origin. Jestin, who was born in Kuwait to parents from south India, said simply of his win, "It feels really good." Jestin was awarded a $100 savings bond and a Webster's dictionary as well as a trip to Washington, DC to represent Boston the Scripps National Spelling Bee. His father, Jestin Jose, commented, "We put a lot of effort behind him." Christy is the eldest of three children and both of his parents are nurses.

Wang was disqualified when he misspelled the word "spoor", a Dutch and Afrikaans derived word used in hunting and fishing for traces of an animal's presence such as scent or tracks. From the nearby Josiah Quincy School, fourth grader Khugan Chan, the US born son of an Indian mother and Chinese-American father, lasted until round four, when he misspelled the word "imperative". The spelling bee's word list was overall a range of familiar vocabulary such as "confidence", "gorgeous" and "knapsack" and relatively arcane, foreign loan words such as "wiki wiki" and "alcazar" not commonly heard in everyday parlance. The competitors in the spelling bee were similarly international in origin: sixth grader Ruth Shiferaw of the Lyndon K-8 school is the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants; Josiah Quincy Elementary School champion, fifth grader Khugan Chan, is the US born son of an Indian mother and Chinese father; and many of the other competitors were of Asian and Latino heritage, reflecting the diversity of Boston's population.

In speaking about their schools' spelling champs, the principals of Harvard/Kent and JQES beamed with pride. JQES principal Simon Ho said via e-mail, "I am very excited to have Khugan representing the Quincy School to compete at the citywide Spelling Bee. He has great potential to do very well on Saturday." Speaking in a telephone interview of South End speller Jian Han Wang, Gallagher said, "He came to us and didn't know much English, but he now does well across the board in everything because he has worked so hard over the years. He gets along really well with his friends. He's a great kid".