DATE: September 14, 2011 3:54:42 PM CDT

Fort Bend Independent School District

NEWS RELEASE

FROM COMMUNITY RELATIONS

281.634.1100

** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE **

Fifty FBISD 2012 National Merit Semifinalists Named

FORT BEND ISD – The Fort Bend Independent School District is proud to announce the names of 50 FBISD students who have been named semifinalists in the 2012 National Merit Scholarship Program. To put that number in perspective, Fort Bend ISD has one of the highest percentages of National Merit Semifinalists among the larger school districts in Texas.

The 50 FBISD semifinalists were selected from more than 1.5 million high school students in more than 22,000 United States high schools who entered the 2012 Merit Program by taking the PSAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists represents 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.

Fort Bend ISD's 2012 National Merit semifinalists by campus are:

Austin High School – Zain Admani, Nicole Hill, Carolyn Levert, Christopher Long, Anna Minmier, Aditya Srivatsan, and David Zhao;

Bush High School – Andy Dao;

Clements High School – Mathis Benjamin, Shivani Bindal, Vanessa Chen, Siddharth Desai, Abhay Divakaruni,

Katherine Du, Christine Ge, Allen Hwang, Michael Jin, Nishika Karbhari, Stacey Lau, Stephanie Lin, Terry

Lin, Eric Lo, Margaret Lynch, Rahul Naik, Kevin Pham, Kristen Pownell, Karishma Punjani, Sahar Sawani, Bob

Shao, Anne Shen, Siddharth Sridhar, Yu-Ting Toh, Brooke Tolle, Sid Venkataraman, Vickie Wang, Scott

Yarbrough and Tyler Yates;

Dulles High School – Katherine Chan, Katherine Chuang, Julian Duodu, Miles Ohman, and Anh Phan.

Hightower High School – Neerja Aggarwal, Anita Vasudevan, and Jane Zhu;

Kempner High School – Jacob Barrios, Jordan Huynh and Meghan Kamath; and

Travis High School – Sydney Hodges and Albert Zhang.

These high school seniors have an opportunity to continue in the competition for 8,300 Merit® Scholarship awards valued at $34 million that will be offered next spring.