Honorees in the National Merit Scholarship program have been announced and include students from local public high schools.
15 students from Collier County Public Schools and 11 from Lee County Public Schools have been named National Merit Semifinalists.
Semifinalists represent less than 1% of all high school seniors.
This year’s Lee County contingent is the largest number of school district students honored by the program in at least the past 20 years.
National Merit Semifinalists from Lee County include:
Cape Coral High School
Joshua Recupito
Dunbar High School
Nishini Fernando
Isabella Fowler
Deetya Gogineni
Finlay Schofield
Fort Myers High School
Victoria Busch
Sebastian Canizares
Gateway High School
Madelyn Spitzer
Lee Virtual School
Erik Boys
North Fort Myers High School
Sebastian Jeanpierre
Justin Wang
Students from Collier County include:
Aubrey Rogers High School
Jude Gillen
Barron Collier High School
Fintan D. O'Keefe
Community School of Naples
Gabriel Alsokary
Hudson Casto
Grace E. Cunningham
Gavin, William J.
Madeline R. Goldberg
Suran Rao
Gulf Coast High School
Ryan S. McElhinney
Logan K. Mederos-White
Naresh Ram
Jenna A. Seivert
Home school/Online school
Xavier Baquero-Iglesias
Mason Classical Academy
Nikolai Pratasenia
Lorenzo Walker Technical High School
Gavin E. Hensley
Over 1.3 million juniors in about 20,000 high schools entered the 2026 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2024 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.
To become a finalist, the semifinalist and a high school official must submit a detailed scholarship application, in which they provide information about the semifinalist’s academic record, participation in school and community activities, demonstrated leadership abilities, employment, and honors and awards received.
A semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay, and earn SAT or ACT scores that confirm the student’s earlier performance on the qualifying test.
From over 16,000 semifinalists, more than 15,000 are expected to advance to the finalist level, and in February they will be notified of this designation. All National Merit Scholarship winners will be selected from this group of finalists.
Every finalist will compete for one of 2,500 National Merit $2,500 scholarships that will be awarded on a state-representational basis.
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