Mary Skirvin, an eighth-grader at Brown County Junior High School, center, at the awards ceremony with Chuck Carney, director of communications and media relations at the IU School of Education, and Teresa White, director of the IU Bee and the Indiana High School Journalism Institute in the IU School of Journalism.Brown County student wins spelling bee at Indiana University Bloomington
Mary Skirvin, an eighth-grader from Brown County Junior High School, was the winner of the 2013 IU Bee at the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington on Feb. 23.
The runner-up was Serena Fox, a seventh-grader at Jackson Creek Middle School in Bloomington. Serena and Mary went head-to head for the last few rounds of the contest, which serves as the Scripps Regional Spelling Bee for South Central Indiana.
Twenty-six students from five Indiana counties -- Brown, Greene, Monroe, Morgan and Owen -- participated in the bee.
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Mary receives an all-expenses-paid trip for two to the national competition in National Harbor, Md., on May 28 to 30. Her winning word was "braggadocio," which means "empty boasting." Serena was eliminated after misspelling "shrieval," which means "of or relating to a sheriff."
In addition to the trip to the national bee, Mary received a copy of the Merriam-Webster Third New International Dictionary; the Samuel Louis Sugarman Award, which is a 2013 United States Mint Proof Set; and a one-year subscription to Britannica.com from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The bee was sponsored for the second year by the IU School of Journalism and the IU School of Education. It began in 2004 under the sponsorship of The (Bloomington, Ind.) Herald-Times and the (Martinsville, Ind.) Reporter-Times.