Michael Durnil, who has served as the bee’s executive director since March.
But the pandemic also created opportunities for the contest to evolve, says J. Due to COVID-19, 2020 marked only the first time since World War II that the national spell-off did not occur. Scripps Company and known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 1941, has grown from a contest between a few dozen kids to, in 2019, a televised face-off between 562 finalists. I mean, had a little bit of trouble affording it.” The word is “opportunity” “But he said, ‘I didn’t have it because it was way too expensive.’ His family just couldn’t afford it. Like having a book but no pages,” she says. “I can’t even describe what not having SpellPundit is like. She saw an example of that dynamic just recently: an aspiring speller to whom she spoke during a virtual Scripps event told her he didn’t have SpellPundit, a popular prep resource, an annual subscription to which in 2020 cost $600. It takes resources to be competitive, and in a country where the median household incomes for Black and Hispanic families is tens of thousands of dollars lower than those for Asian and white families, some kids are at a disadvantage. She knows, she says, that the paucity of faces that look like hers in the world of competitive spelling isn’t because Black kids don’t want to spell.
