Contact: Lisa Deffendall • First Posted: Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Thirty-nine Fayette County Public Schools seniors have been named National Merit semifinalists and are now eligible for a share in roughly $35 million worth of college scholarships next spring. Not only is this a record number of students for the school district, it is the first time in recent memory that every single high school in FCPS had a semifinalist.

This is an honor awarded to less than 1 percent of students nationally – those who earn the top scores on the 2007 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT).  Across Kentucky, 228 semifinalists were named, including the 39 in FCPS.  That means 17 percent of the state’s merit scholars came from our local schools, although the district accounts for only 5 percent of the total student population in Kentucky!

The Fayette County semifinalists are:

Bryan Station High School: Zachary Davis;

Henry Clay High School: April Dodd, Alexander Dutch, David Fraebel, James Fritz, Jared Gibson, Julia Hunter, Christopher Jacovitch, Rachel Looff, Sarah Looff, Margaret Lutz, Daniel Richey, Lilian Rogers, Erin Wrightson and Le Zhang;

Lafayette High School: Brittany Fenner, Abby Kirk, Sonya Rich, Evan Shirley and Qing Xie;

Paul Laurence Dunbar High School: Alayna Boland, Scott Calvert, Tessa Cavagnero, Daniel Coffman, Leslie Davis, John Fitzpatrick, Jack Fogle, Jennifer Grasch, Pavitra Muralidhar, Benjamin Nosarzewski, Elliott Rosenberg, Kyle Rosenberg, Rahul Sharma, Michael Shen, Hanyuan Shi, Adam Timaji, Connie Wu and Mimi Yang;

Tates Creek High School: Natasha Druggan.

Across the country, there were roughly 16,000 semifinalists named in the 54^th annual National Merit Scholarship Program. More than 1.5 million juniors in nearly 21,000 U.S. high schools entered the 2008 program last fall.