Local 7th grader representing St. Louis at this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee

ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOV) - A local middle school student is representing St. Louis at the 95th Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The week-long competition pits 231 of the brightest kids against one another to find one spelling champ. There are seven spellers from Missouri and 14 from Illinois.

Sonia Kulkarni, 12, is representing St. Louis. She is a 7th grader at John Burroughs School in Ladue.

“I think that the fact that I’ve studied for so long and I know a lot of words, but also it’s not just that that I think makes a good speller,” she said. “It’s knowing how to figure out the spelling of a word if you don’t know it, such as based on language patterns and root words that you might find in the language of origin or definition. "

Preliminaries began at 8″:30 a.m. Monday. So far, Kulkarni has made it through two rounds.

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