Nearly 40 students across DeKalb County are one step closer to being named National Merit Scholars.
According to numbers released this week, 37 seniors in the county were named semifinalists in the National Merit Scholarship Program.
About 1.5 million students from high schools across the country entered the National Merit program by taking the 2018 Preliminary SAT, or PSAT. From those entries, just 16,000 were named semifinalists.
The pool of semifinalists amounts to less than 1% of American high school seniors, the group said.
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A semifinalist must have an “outstanding academic record throughout high school” along with a recommendation by a high school official, an essay and high SAT/ACT scores, the program said in a statement.
In the DeKalb County School District, seniors at Druid Hills, Lakeside, Chamblee Charter, Decatur, Dunwoody, Arabia Mountain and Tucker high schools made the prestigious list. Some private schools located in DeKalb, including Ben Franklin Academy, The Paideia School and St. Pius X Catholic High School, also had semifinalists.
Chamblee Charter High School had the most semifinalists, with 13.
Nearly 90% are expected to move to the finalist round, which requires a detailed scholarship application with their academic record, participation in school/community activities, demonstrated leadership abilities, employment, and honors/awards received. Finalists are set to be notified in February.
Ultimately, National Merit Scholars will earn scholarships worth $31 million total.
Here are the semifinalists:
Arabia Mountain High School
Camille Chatman
Ben Franklin Academy
Jonas Iskander
Chamblee Charter High School
Emily Adams
Rachel Choi
Andrew Council
Layla Dhabaan
Anish Jaisinghani
Deborah Kitzler
Amy Lin
Connor Lin
Hudson McGaughey
Ritu Reddy
Ethan Shi
Brenna Turner
Shanru Xu
Decatur High School
Garrett Baird
Shalin Jain
Druid Hills High School
Theodore Shepherd
Dunwoody High School
Galya Fischer
Justin Jasper
Lakeside High School
Hanna Baniassad
Adan Jarvis
Ruby Reich
Madelyn Shaffer
Jenny Zha
Emily Zhou
The Paideia School
Will Hutchinson
Aidyn Levin
Charlotte Lewis
Josephine Miller
John Spencer
Emiko Wu
Anna Zheng
St. Pius X Catholic High School
Ty Mancao
Tatiana Solsrud
Tucker High School
Joshua Perlmutter
Eric Shavkin
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