SAN FERNANDO : ESL Students Enjoy Spell of Success

The bleachers inside San Fernando High School were packed with about 200 people. As shouts and murmurs subsided, all eyes focused and ears tuned to the person standing at a microphone in the center of the basketball court.

Naomi Ramirez, 20, of Panorama City waited there calmly, her hands clasped, her left shoe lodged in the eye of the school’s painted tiger logo.

“EEEgypt-shun,” said the word caller, in an exaggerated pronunciation of the word that Ramirez was being asked to spell. “King Tut was an Egyptian king.”

Ramirez thought for a moment while the crowd groaned at the difficult selection. “ Silencio por favor ! (Please be quiet),” the word caller cried.

Shushing sounds followed, and Ramirez began.

“E-G-I-P-C-Y-A-N,” she spelled out, confidently.

A clanking cow bell and sign painted with a sad face told her she had erred. Still, Ramirez took home a second-place trophy for the words she spelled correctly in the Kennedy-San Fernando Community Adult School spelling bee held Wednesday night.

Ramirez and about 75 other students enrolled in English as a Second Language evening classes participated in the school’s fifth annual spelling bee, a huge event eclipsed only by the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration, instructors said.

In all, 12 trophies were handed out to first-, second- and third-place winners enrolled in various instructional levels. Students prepared for the voluntary spelling competition for weeks, teachers said. The bee, held on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, was attended by hundreds of students enrolled at the school, as well as the relatives and friends of the participants.

Gary Summerville, an ESL teacher at the night school who teaches third- and fourth-graders by day, said his adult students hounded him to conduct special spelling bee practice drills in preparation for the event.

Wednesday, Summerville screamed unabashedly in support of his pupil, Marleny Hernandez, 36, one of the contestants in the interim-high level competition.

Hernandez, a private nurse by day, said she plans to continue night school until she gets her high school diploma. Hernandez, who took second-place honors in the bee, later plans to attend Mission College to study computer science.

“They take this very, very seriously,” Summerville said. “They also get very disappointed when they lose. But what’s important is that they’re out here competing, and they realize that. They know the value of education.”