Four Shorecrest students are National Merit Semifinalists

Back row from left: Isabelle Edwards, Shorecrest Principal Pat Hegarty, Skylar Shibayama. Front row: Christopher Hughes, Kelsey Josund. Photo courtesy Shoreline Schools

Four Shorecrest High School seniors have qualified as 2012 National Merit Semifinalists. They are Isabelle Edwards, Christopher Hughes, Kelsey Josund and Skylar Shibayama.

These students have the opportunity to compete for Merit Scholarship awards by qualifying as a National Merit Finalist. About 16,000 seniors nationwide will be competing for some 8,300 Merit Scholarships worth more than $34 million that will be awarded next spring.

More than 1.5 million juniors in nearly 21,000 high schools entered the 2012 National Merit Program by taking the 2010 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, which represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of Semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state's percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.

To become a Finalist, a Semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by the school principal, and earn SAT scores that confirm the student's earlier qualifying test performance. Merit Scholar designees are selected on the basis of their skills, accomplishments, and potential for success in rigorous college studies.