East Meadow boy wins Long Island Spelling Bee

Naman Shakrani stood alone on stage at the Long Island Spelling Bee on March 10. The five finalists before him had taken their seats, each having misspelled a word. Judges told Shakrani, a 10-year-old from East Meadow, that if he spelled the next two words correctly, he would win the competition. 

With no questions asked, Naman spelled “perpend” and “noctograph.” With that, the W.T. Clarke Middle School sixth-grader was crowned the champion. He will compete in the nationally televised Scripps National Spelling Bee in June.

“It was unbelievable,” said his mother, Bijal Shakrani, who, like his father, Kamlesh, is originally from India.

Naman’s road to the stage at Plainview-Old Bethpage Middle School was remarkable, to say the least. He was a late bloomer as a baby, and did not speak until he was 26 months old. But he loved to read. By the time he was 4, he was in a program for gifted children and competed in his first spelling bee -— which he won. He skipped parts of second and third grade at Meadowbrook Elementary School and entered Clarke as a 10-year-old. 

At the middle school, Naman’s spelling prowess took center stage. After school one afternoon, he nonchalantly told his parents that he had won a class spelling bee. “I said ‘OK, must be something going on in school,’” Bijal recalled. “Next thing I hear, we have a competition between all the winners in each grade.”

But winning that contest, in January, proved not so easy. After it dwindled from 28 students down to four, the final round turned out to be epic. More than 100 words later, the contest had to be suspended and resumed another day because the judges ran out of challenging words. The last student standing was Naman.

He was invited to compete against more than 100 champions from other Long Island schools in a written semifinal test at Plainview-Old Bethpage Middle School. The field was cut down to 20 for last week’s L.I. Spelling Bee finals, sponsored by the Long Island Jewish World.