Austin Elementary School fifth grader Sarv Dharavane is heading to the Georgia State Spelling Bee once again after winning the Georgia Association of Educators Region 4 crown on Feb. 22.
The state competition will be held March 21 at the Georgia State University Student Center featuring winners from other region contests.
Specific details about Dharavane’s win have not been released officially by the GAE, but his family and others revealed that the fifth-grader is heading to state competition for the second consecutive year.
His journey began when Dharavane won his school’s spelling bee, and progressed on Jan. 28, when he took the DeKalb County School District (DCSD) crown, with Adhvik Ravikumar, a fifth grader at Vanderlyn Elementary as runner up.
The pair competed against 18 other qualifiers in the January contest, which had been delayed because of inclement weather. The contest went 19 rounds, with Dharavane and Ravikumar the lone competitors for the last four of them.
After the two breezed through words like “nonage,” dactylic,” and “alpestrine,” Ravikumar stumbled, and Dharavane won by spelling correctly “bruxism,” a condition where a person clenches, grinds, or gnashes his or her teeth either while awake or in their sleep, according to DeKalb County School District officials.
Last year, Dharavane, then 10 years old, ran the table over 18 rounds, winning the 63rd Annual Georgia Association of Educators State Spelling Bee without missing a word (including vocabulary).
Dharavane along with runner up Matthew Baber, an eighth grader from Rising Starr Middle, represented Georgia in the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee Championships in National Harbor, MD. Barber came in 60th and Dharavane tied for 22nd.
His plan, he told Rough Draft in an earlier interview, is to continue to progress to the national competition each year until he wins it all. As a riser fifth grader, he could theoretically have four more chances.
