'I think I'll be able to win it': Homeschooled student advances to regional spelling bee

This year's Alachua County schools spelling bee champion doesn't attend an Alachua County public school.

Students in grades 5 through 8 competed Feb. 7 for a chance to represent the county at the regional spelling bee in Jacksonville. Among the crowd of 35 public and private school students was 12-year-old Cooper Campen, the only homeschooled student in attendance, who would take home the title of Alachua County’s spelling bee winner.

His winning word? Rasorial, relating to a bird, means habitually scratching the ground in search of food.

The sixth-grader said his favorite subjects are history and science, but one of Campen’s favorite things to do is read. He’s read a plethora of materials and said he doesn’t really have a favorite genre – he enjoys reading almost anything. Historical fiction, science fiction and biographies interest him, and he’s seen words from some of the books he’s read at the spelling bee.

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Aside from reading, Campen enjoys building, 3D printing and playing guitar.

Campen and his parents registered their homeschool as a school with Scripps so he could compete. He believes homeschoolers don’t compete as often because they don’t realize they can and said it took a lot of research and emails to figure out how he could compete.

“I'm definitely very grateful to compete, because homeschoolers don't usually compete,” he said. “I'm just really glad that I have the opportunity to do this as a homeschooler."

Families must pay a registration fee to the regional office for homeschooled students to participate, and that’s about all they have to do to enter, said Jackie Johnson, spokesperson for the school district. Scripps guidelines allow homeschool students to register.

She also said homeschooled students are fairly common in the district’s spelling bee and in the past homeschooled students have typically been selected by an umbrella organization.

Campen said he studied for the county spelling bee with an app developed by Scripps – who hosts the National Spelling Bee – that gives pronunciation, definition and language of origin for words that may appear at a spelling bee. The student then types the word out with the goal of spelling it correctly. It also allows students to bookmark words they got wrong and study them further.

Shirley Campen, Cooper’s mother, said she and his father are very proud of Cooper and thankful for this opportunity.

"I wasn't sure what to expect, but I felt like he had a pretty good chance of winning,” she said. “Like he said, he's a strong reader. He learned how to read when he was three years old and he's been an avid reader ever since then, so I felt like that was going to probably help him quite a bit, and then he did some preparing at home. So we were confident and we just felt like whatever was going to happen was going to happen."

His mother is a former Alachua County Public Schools teacher and is now a homeschool teacher for Campen and his 9-year-old brother, Alexander Campen.

“We at home just know that pretty much anything can be an educational opportunity," she said. "There's educational opportunities everywhere, all day long."

Campen and his brother became homeschooled in 2020, then attended a hybrid program at private school Cornerstone Academy before becoming fully homeschooled again this year. He is in an a la carte music class at the academy.

While attending Cornerstone Academy, Campen won the school’s spelling bee last year. He represented the academy in the countywide competition where he made it to the third round and got out on the word “symmetry”, which is now his least favorite word to spell.

Campen plans to prepare for regionals the same way he did for the local spelling bee. He has recently watched prior regional spelling bees and believes he has a good chance of winning.

“It seems like as long as we just keep going on the path that we're already going on – going through the app, highlighting them, all of that – I think I'll be able to win it,” Campen said.

His advice to students interested in competing in a spelling bee is simple: read – a lot.

“A lot of the words that were in there I knew because I read it someplace,” Campen said. “A lot of the words that I learned from the spelling bee I've read in other places after that."

Campen said there is not one specific word that is the hardest to spell. Words aren’t hard, he said, but ones that don’t follow spelling rules are the most difficult.

Campen will represent Alachua County in the 80th annual First Coast Regional Spelling Bee in Jacksonville on March 25 and compete for a chance to advance to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Homeschooled student Cooper Campen wins 2024 Alachua County Public Schools Spelling Bee