Spring Branch ISD Featured News

New College Board Updates Included in This Report

Twenty-seven seniors from Spring Branch ISD high schools were named recently as National Merit Scholarship Program Semifinalists or National Hispanic Recognition Program student award recipients.

Based on annual recognition by the College Board, these students rank among the best young minds of their generation at the region, state and national level.

Student honorees and their families will be recognized on Monday, Oct. 29, during the regular monthly meeting of the SBISD Board of Trustees.

Seventeen students from Memorial and Stratford high schools, as well as Westchester Academy for International Studies, a district charter high school, were named National Merit Semifinalists earlier this fall.

Memorial High School has 13 students being honored with this national award. They include Liam Berney, Aneesa Bhakta, Merrick Huang, Hyungu Ju, Jun Seok Kim, Sarah King, Tianrun Ma, Minwoo Park, Aidan Shine, Susan Soh, Isha Thapar, Crystal Wang and Frederick Wilhelm.

Stratford High has three National Merit Semifinalists. They include William Hannigan, Andrew Walker and Carissa Yun.

Also named as a National Merit Semifinalist at Westchester Academy for International Studies is Matthew Rosca-Halmagean.

Students are made eligible for this national scholarship program as juniors when they take the PSAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

National Merit Semifinalists represent less than 1 percent of the high school graduating class in Texas and rank as the nation’s highest-scoring test takers. These students now have an opportunity to qualify for National Merit Finalist awards, to be announced in the spring of 2019. They may also qualify for significant scholarship opportunities.

At this time, seven additional SBISD high school students have been named finalists in the annual National Hispanic Recognition Program.

Known as the National Hispanic Scholar award, this recognition has been issued by the College Board to six Memorial High students. They are Maria Amador, Tyler Baldwin, Lily Fabrega, Josephine Jamison, Amanda Junek and David Nemoto.

Additional National Hispanic Scholars include Giovanni Torres of Spring Woods High, and Valeria Robayo and Andrew Plant of Stratford High. At Westchester Academy for International Studies, Amaris Bobbio-Tarco has also been named a National Hispanic Scholar.

To earn this honor, students must be at least one-quarter Hispanic/Latino through family descent, attain a high-performance level on the PSAT, and have a GPA of 3.0 or higher by the end of their junior year. Up to 5,000 seniors nationally earn this award each year.

For details on these and related student recognition and scholarship programs, please visit the College Board website: https://www.collegeboard.org/