Although photographer Charmaine George and I couldn’t get to all eleven New Tampa public schools for the Great American Teach-In on Nov. 21, we did make it to four local schools for that event and on this page are photos from our respective visits.
Charmaine was at Benito Middle School when teacher Justin Swaim brought members of the Wharton High orchestra (l.-r. in left photo) Travis Bivins, Eliza Connell, Zoie Bowers and Sofia Salazar — all of whom are Benito alumni, to their former middle school, as well as for Michael Harvey of the Florida State Guard Aviation Response Squadron’s visit to Richard Roy’s math class (bottom left photo).
She also visited Heritage Elementary, where the Kids and Canines organization visited Heather Leitzki’s Exceptional Student Education (ESE) class (top photo). Charmaine also took pics at when Waste Connections lead truck driver and instructor Thomas Benton (middle photo below) demonstrated how the trucks work.
I was able to stop in at Tampa Palms Elementary for online star Zackery Turgeon (below right) captivated all of the school’s 4th-grade classes (where most of the kids wanted to follow in his footsteps) with his discussion of how he makes a living, thanks to the 700,000+ subscribers to his “Corny” channel on YouTube.
I then visited teacher Jamie Miller’s class at Freedom High (bottom right), where I talked to her students about not only the Neighborhood News, but also writing and editing in general, and I was thrilled that some of her students actually asked me questions about my job. — GN
New Tampa says good-bye to several beloved and long-serving principals at the end of the 2021-22 school year, including Chiles Elementary’s Dr. Teri Evans and Benito Middle School’s John Sanders, who are both retiring, Liberty Middle’s James Amiratti and Maryann Lippek, who is moving from Tampa Palms Elementary (TPE) to Schmidt Elementary in Brandon.
Lippek has been at TPE since the school opened in 2004, and has served as its principal since 2014. She is being replaced by Angela Gluth, an assistant principal from Heritage Elementary.
Frank Diaz is coming over from Webb Middle to replace Amiratti.
At Chiles, Evans will be replaced by Todd Connolly, who is moving from Riverhills Elementary in Temple Terrace.
Evans became a teacher after raising her kids as a stay-at-home mom. First entering the classroom at 40 years old, she then spent her entire 24-year career in New Tampa. She taught at Chiles, Hunter’s Green and Pride elementaries, then returned to Chiles as principal nine years ago.
“I’ll miss the whole Chiles community — the families, the kids, and the teachers,” Evans says. “It’s the best place, my home, and I’ve made lifelong friends (here).”
She looks forward to a change of pace, spending time with her grandkids, reading and traveling.
Evans adds that the school will be getting a new air conditioning system over the summer, so the building will be closed. The office will temporarily move to Tampa Palms, which is where new principal Connolly will work until the new A/C upgrade is complete.
Meanwhile, at Benito, Brent Williams takes over as principal for the retiring Sanders. Williams was most recently principal at Memorial Middle School in Tampa.
Williams has been an educator for 27 years, previously working in Alachua and Miami Dade counties before moving to Hillsborough in 2006. Over the course of his career, he has served as a teacher, peer evaluator, assistant principal and principal.
“I truly appreciate and admire the work that has been done here by Mr. Sanders,” says Williams. “I look forward to working with an exceptional group of faculty and staff members to continue the great tradition of excellence at Benito Middle School.”
Williams says he comes from a family of educators and that his wife Sonja also is a teacher in Hillsborough County.
He expects to be highly visible to students in the hallways, classrooms, cafeteria, and at the school’s extracurricular activities, and says that his door will be always open to them.
“I want them to think outside the box and have a voice on what their experience here at Benito will look like,” he says.
Math teacher Daniel Gostkowski says he and many others are excited to welcome their new leader to the school.
“He seems very genuine,” Gostkowski says of Williams. “He genuinely cares about the kids, the community and the people in the building.”
New Tampa Again Accepts County PTA/PTSA Awards
The Hillsborough County Council of PTAs/PTSAs announced this year’s countywide award winners at a ceremony on May 19. Several New Tampa schools took home trophies for their efforts this year.
Freedom High’s Christina Finn won Volunteer of the Year and assistant principal Jenna Lamour won Administrator of the Year.
The school also took home an award in the Educational Program category, and Freedom also won the high school category for Top Community Partner, which honored Infinite Edge Learning Center (also located in Tampa Palms) for its support of the school.
The Top Community Partner award at the elementary school level went to Hunter’s Green, which nominated the Hunter’s Green Homeowners Association.
Wharton High also took home some honors, as school nurse Angela Strahl won Non-Instructional Person of the Year and Crystal LeFebvre, culture and climate resource teacher, was named Instructional Person of the Year.
Wharton also won in the Health & Safety category for its comprehensive support of the school’s nurses and clinic throughout the year.
The Hillsborough County champs: (Front row, l.-r.:) Sharuya Kataria, Devin Etienne, Druve Kulkarni, Nikhil Katiyar, Kamal Abutaha; (middle row, l.-r.:) Layth Yassin, Gregory Morris, Arman Razavi, Nithin Sivamoorthy; (back row, l.-r.:) Tristan Wilhoyt, Owen Brown, Grayson Gonzalez, Dillon Hand, Sully Al Qadheeb, Rithik Borra, Karl Rix. Coaches (bottom right, left to right:) Austin Hand, Karen Burchfield & Chris Ellis.
The Benito Middle School boys volleyball team had been 9-0 before. It had been dominant in previous years. It had won its cluster, or league, multiple times.
However, the Cougars had never won a Hillsborough County championship.
This year, however, was different.
This year, they just happened to have a Hand up on the opposition.
Rolling behind the best player the school has ever had, 8th grader Dillon Hand, the Cougars dropped only one set all season and captured the school’s first-ever boys volleyball county championship.
Benito defeated Roland Park 25-9, 25-12 last month to take home the school’s first-ever County title.
“We went into the season thinking we had a really good shot,” says coach Chris Ellis. “They practiced like all-stars, but sometimes got into games and were tight. We were winning by five points against teams we should have been blowing out.”
If there were any doubts about the Cougars rising to the challenge, they answered it in the first game of the playoffs against defending County Champion Tomlin Middle School, which many saw as the real county championship game.
After splitting the first two sets, the match went to a decisive 15-point third set. Tomlin raced to a 6-0 lead, and then the lead was 11-5. Time was running out.
“I called a timeout and just tried to relax everyone,” Ellis said. “I told them that this was going to be the greatest story in 40 minutes, that they would be in their cars on the way home just going crazy that they came back and won the county championship. So, just relax and let’s take this thing over.”
The Cougars responded with nearly flawless play, scoring 10 of the final 12 points for a 15-13 win, and coasted to wins in the semifinals and final the next two days.
“We were getting pounded, and then they started making mistakes and we didn’t,” said assistant coach Karen Burchfield. “We just got on a roll.”
Burchfield also coaches the Benito girls volleyball team (with Ellis assisting), which was 9-1 this season. She won a county title in 2013, with star Kathryn Attar, who also was a standout at Wharton and is currently an All-Ivy League Conference performer at Yale University.
The 6’-2” Hand has drawn comparisons to Attar, for his dominance and leadership in a championship season. Ellis says Hand is arguably the best eighth-grader in the state, able to control the action at the net as well as possessing a major league jump serve.
Hand’s brother Austin was on the first-ever boys volleyball team at Benito in 2017 and helped as an assistant coach on the team this year.
Ellis says the team’s one play this season was setting Hand for the kill, but the rest of the Cougars definitely helped make that possible.
Owen Brown (far left) delivers a header for a point on what Ellis calls Benito’s Play of the Year.
Setter Arman Razavi, also an eighth-grader, was the only Cougar with prior experience other than Hand. His ability to get the ball to Hand was the team’s primary source of offense, but he also served out the last four points of the Tomlin match when there was no room for error.
Libero Kamal Abutaha was a rarity — a sixth-grader who started at one of the sport’s toughest positions. He managed, however, to dig enough balls to Razavi to keep the offense humming, even in the county semifinals, when he had to wear his sister’s Vans because he forgot his shoes.
Sully Al-Qadheeb was the emotional leader on the team, who received a tryout — after the team had already been selected — at the recommendation of track/football coach Rodney Sharpe.
“Coach, I know you already announced the team, but this kid can jump out of the gym,” he told Ellis. “You should give him a look.”
Ellis says five minutes into his tryout, and despite zero volleyball experience, Sully was a starter. He made a number of big plays during the season, including a tip in the third set against Tomlin that tied the score at 12 and swung the momentum in Benito’s favor for good.
Eighth-grader and co-captain Nikhil Katiyar put off soccer to commit to the volleyball team, and always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Owen Brown — also an eighth-grade co-captain — was consistent at the net but will probably be remembered most for heading the ball during the second set of the championship game, which scored a point and fired up the team so much they had to make a TikTok video of the feat.
Another eighth-grader, Boden Houck, earned his way into the rotation because of his serve, and he led the team off with his serve in every match, and Druve Kulkarni also chipped in with some big serves during the playoffs.
“Dillon was very good, obviously,” Ellis said. “He was ridiculous this season. But, this was a great team. Everyone had a role, and they played it perfectly.”
*Every New Tampa school had the same grade for 2018-19 as it did the previous school year, with the exception of Hunter’s Green Elementary, which improved to a “B” grade after four straight years of “C” grades.
*New Tampa had six schools earn “A” grades, two that earned B grades and three earned C grades.
*Chiles Elementary was the only New Tampa school to score higher than 80 in English Language Arts (ELA), Math and Science Achievement.
*Pride Elementary earned the best score among our schools for ELA Achievement (86), while Chiles was tops in Math (85) and Science (85).
*Chiles is now 17-for-17 in earning an A grade from the state.
*However, Benito Middle School, Pride and Clark elementaries all have the longest current streak of “A” grades — 18 straight years, dating back to 2002.
* Freedom and Wharton high schools were both “C” schools for the fourth straight year.
* Did you know that from 2008-10, every elementary and middle school in New Tampa earned A grades?
Nupur Lala bought some time by asking for it to be used in a sentence. A hint of a smile crossed her bespectacled face. Inside, she was bursting.
Meena Lala watched her 14-year-old daughter intently. There had been one scare during the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but that was a few rounds back, on the word “poimenics,” maybe the only time she had gotten nervous.
But not now. Not on this word.
“L-O-G…”
Odalys Pritchard remembers the moment like it was yesterday. She was on the edge of her seat, watching her Benito Middle School eighth grader on ESPN trying to spell her way into history.
“I remember seeing the smile and the confidence when they gave her the word,” Pritchard says. “I knew she knew it.”
“…O-R-R…”
Right before she was given the final word, Nupur caught a glimpse of the event organizers preparing the trophy for the winner.
“It felt like a dream,” she says, and she wasted no time, quickly spelling the winning word.
“…H-E-A!”
When Nupur nailed the final word at the 76th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee on June 3, 1999, she jumped as high as she could two times, stopped to tuck her shoulder-length hair behind each ear, and jumped again, her yellow placard designating her as Speller No. 165 flailing about with her arms.
She grabbed the big trophy, raised it up to the sky and smiled the widest of smiles.
“It didn’t feel real,” says Nupur, now age 34. “I remember jumping up and down, and wondering ‘Is there going to be ground beneath me when I land?’”
***
Twenty years later, she remembers every detail, from the hero’s greeting she received at Tampa International Airport to receiving a key to the city to a slew of television cameras eager to record her every move.
There were banners declaring “Busch Gardens Spells Champ N-U-P-U-R” and local daily newspaper headlines calling her “The goddess of spelling.” The Neighborhood News (see pg. 36) called her “Super Nupur.”
New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner invited her to New York and gave her tickets to see “Phantom” on Broadway. Even Hooters put up a sign congratulating Nupur.
Her parents, Meena and Nupur’s father Parag, had her write the restaurant a thank-you letter.
“In hindsight, thinking back, it was extraordinary,” she says. “I’ll never forget the way that Tampa treated me.”
Nupur is greeted at Busch Gardens after her win.
However, when she felt the most famous, she says, is when her mother was driving her home to Hunter’s Green one day, and the guard at the gate asked if that was the Spelling Bee champ in the back seat.
Meena said yes, and he asked if she could hop out and say hi. This was a time before cell phones, so he didn’t want a picture. He just wanted to congratulate her and share his admiration for her accomplishment.
“That might have been the moment I felt really famous,” Nupur says.
***
It was just the beginning, though. In 2002, the documentary “Spellbound” was released, to critical acclaim. It followed Nupur and seven other Regional champions through the 1999 Scripps Spelling Bee competition. It earned $6-million and was nominated for an Oscar, giving Nupur a second round of fame.
She never thought she would always be the Spelling Bee champ from Benito Middle School in Tampa.
“I’d say it’s the one accomplishment in my life people are still interested in,” she says. “It has stayed with me more than anything I’ve done.”
There were times, she says, that fact chafed Nupur. To be defined by something you did at age 14, when you barely knew then who you even were, and then to have so much more expected of you as a result, was frustrating at times.
“I’ve had different feelings at different points in my life about all of it,” Nupur says. “Definitely early high school, early college, I felt that there were such massive expectations from winning the Spelling Bee at 14. I was still trying to figure out who I was and where I wanted to fit in in the world. It was very difficult.”
Today, however, Nupur has found her path. As a result, it is easier to embrace being noticed by someone who recognizes her name or face.
***
Nupur attended high school in Fayetteville, AR, where her family had moved just a few months after the Spelling Bee victory. She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2007 with a B.S. degree in Brain Cognitive and Behavioral Science, and worked for three years at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) in Cambridge doing functional MRI research in cognitive neuroscience
She graduated with a Master’s degree in Cancer Biology from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2015. And, after earning her Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, she is now doing her residency in Neurology at the Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.
She hopes to do a fellowship in neuro-oncology, specifically Glioblastoma multiforme, the brain cancer that killed U.S. Senator John McCain.
***
Millions of students from all 50 states battle each year to make it to The Scripps National Spelling Bee, scheduled this year for Sunday-Friday, May 26-31, in Washington, D.C.
A Benito newsletter recognized Nupur, as well as her stiffest competition.
Nupur remembers the grind. She did her first spelling bee in Kaye Whitehurst’s seventh grade English class, merely to earn extra credit. She hadn’t even heard of the Scripps Spelling Bee, but once she discovered she was good at it, winning it became a goal.
Few remember that she actually made it to our nation’s capital for the first time as a seventh grader, when she was eliminated in the third round on the first day in 1998.
She was happy and proud, but she remembers while she was almost universally praised for her efforts, a classmate taunted her by reminding her that she didn’t win.
“I still remember that feeling. One moment you can be on top, and the next moment, you’re back to being a regular kid,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much it bothered me or how much I internalized that feeling. It fueled me for years.”
Nupur says it was Whitehurst, who had gone to D.C. with her student in 1998, and Pritchard, who is now interim deputy director for Hillsborough County’s Achievement Schools, that helped lift up her spirits.
“Teachers don’t even know the impact they make,” Nupur says. “I hope they read this and know they made a tremendous difference.”
***
With Meena (who spent many hours reading the practice words to her daughter), Whitehurst and Pritchard in her corner, Nupur was determined to get back to the National Spelling Bee in the eighth grade, and her goal was to make it to the televised portion of the event. She competed in a half dozen regional events to qualify, but says the stiffest competition was actually at Benito.
There were 249 competitors from around the country who survived Regionals and made it to Washington and 144 of them were eliminated on the first day.
But, not Nupur. She had made it to the televised portion on Day 2, and when she did, she says a strange calm came over her.
“I met my goal,” she remembers thinking. “It was still the most surreal moment of my life.”
Nupur’s parents moved to the U.S. from a small town in central India in 1984, where Parag worked as an engineering professor at Syracuse University in upstate New York, where Nupur was born. They moved to Tampa in 1997.
Nupur’s win marked a historic shift in the Spelling Bee. Since her win, 19 spellers of Indian descent have either been champion or co-champion.
Since her win, Nupur says she did not watch the Spelling Bee every year. She confesses to a rebellious period where she didn’t want to be the “goddess of spelling” anymore.
But, when she does watch it, she says she finds herself moved by the reactions of the winners, as well as her own memories.
“It was the culmination of a lot of hard work, by me and my family,” Nupur says. “I did something very few people have, and I will forever be grateful for that moment.”
So will those who knew her, like Pritchard. Nupur’s picture commemorating her win still hangs in the front office at Benito. And, for a long time, there was a large photo portrait of Nupur displayed at the Hillsborough County School Board boardroom auditorium, until the boardroom was renovated in 2017.
“It was always nice seeing that picture,” Pritchard says. “I can’t believe it’s been 20 years. Nupur was a shining star. There’s probably a lot of people who remember her vividly.”
