SCHOOLS: National Merit semifinalists named

30 students from Gunn and 20 from Paly join 15,000 students nationwide

The National Merit Scholar semifinalists were recently announced, and Palo Alto's high schools continue to churn out dozens of honorees.

This year Gunn had 30 named to the list while Paly had 20. Both schools had more semifinalists this year than last.

The National Merit Scholar program names 15,000 students nationwide as semifinalists each year. The students qualified on the basis of their scores on the 1996 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. This test is taken by more than 1 million high school juniors.

About 7,000 finalists will be named in the spring. To advance to that level, students must also score well on the SAT, get a recommendation from their high school principal and fill out a detailed application. Finalists may be eligible for college or corporate scholarships.

Other high schools in the area had their share of semifinalists, too. Castilleja School has six students on the list, Menlo-Atherton High School students received five awards and Sacred Heart Prep had a pair of honorees. Menlo School's list of semifinalists was not available.

In addition, Sean Bennett and Tolu Thomas of Gunn and Sara Whetstone of Paly were named as National Achievement semifinalists, awards given to African-American students. Christine Page of Paly was named as a National Hispanic Scholar Recognition semifinalist.

Here are the National Merit semifinalists:

Casteilleja School: Sarah Cobey, Danya Epstein, Carolyn Lenske, Nicole Mans, Theadora Sakata, Serena Wong.

Gunn High School: Eric Anderson, Yonatan Appelbaum, Austin Brown, Benjamin Brutlag, Emily Chung, Sara Granovetter, Jeffrey Green, Ivor Holloway, Stephen Hu, Kai Huang, Wesley Juel, Nicholas Junkerman, Sarah Karlson, Lea Kissner, Ken Lai, Peter Lai, Joseph Lake, Brandon Laws, Sandy Le, Cecile LeCocq, Peter Li, Jeffrey Liang, Jonathan Newsome, Magaret Pines, Danny Sanner, Basil Shen, Amy Tso, Gilead Wurman, Terri Yu, Maud Zimmerman.

Menlo-Atherton High School: Elias Batchelder, Makenzie Brown Harris, Erin Curry, Seth Elliot, Jeff Gibboney, Tyler Grant.

Palo Alto High School: John Abrehamson, Viswanadh Addala, Ilya Beylin, D. Taner Bilir, Marijeta Bozovic, David Braginsky, Isaac Gradman, Symon Harada, Jeffrey Hopwood, Andrew Hotson, Mandy Hu, Nitzan Katz, Dan Kroymann, Marvin Shin, Lee Slone, Matthew Small, Alex Smith, Laura Veuve, Shoshana Winograd-Hutner, Coleen Wrenn.

Sacred Heart Preparatory School: Nick Stewart, Sverker Hogberg.

--Charlie Breitrose

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