Eleven Canyons District students are semi-finalists in the 58th annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

The students are among the 16,000 scholastically talented high school seniors who remain in the competition for 8,300 National Merit Scholarships. The awards, worth more than $32 million, will be announced this spring. Of the Canyons students, eight attend school at Hillcrest. Two are students at Alta, and one attends Jordan.

About 1.5 million juniors in some 22,000 high schools entered the 2013 competition by taking the 2011 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as the initial screen of the entrants. The nationwide pool of semi-finalists, which represent less than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest-scoring entrants in each state. The number of semi-finalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.

A semi-finalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by the high school principal, and earn SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier performance on the qualifying test. The semi-finalist and a high school official must submit a detailed scholarship application, which includes the student’s essay and information about the semi-finalist’s participation and leadership in school and community activities.

The CSD students who have earned semi-finalist status are: 

Hillcrest
Jacob Brown
Joshua T. Fairbourn
Cory D. Goates
Aaron A. Johnson
Micah R. Johnston,
John R. Morrell
Jarom T. Norris
Caius S. Worthen

Alta
Parker Awerkamp
Macey Crockett

Jordan
Jessica Lindsay