Twenty-eight Lake Washington School District(LWSD) high school seniors qualified as semifinalists in the 60th annual National Merit Scholarship Program, as announced by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.

A total of 16,000 high school seniors nationwide have qualified. About 90 percent of these semifinalists are expected to advance to the finalist level and more than half of the finalists will win a National Merit Scholarship, earning the Merit Scholar title. These students will have the opportunity to continue in the competition for some 7,600 National Merit Scholarships, worth more than $33 million that will be offered next spring.

Students qualified for these awards by completing the 2013 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, which represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state.

Redmond High School had the highest number of recipients in the district, with 11 students named as semifinalists, followed by Tesla STEM High School with seven students named semifinalists. All four comprehensive high schools had at least two semifinalists.

Lake Washington School District National Merit Semifinalists

Eastlake High School: Akanksha Bawa, Ashwathy Goutham, Gabriel See and Cheng Shan.

International Community School: Jacqueline Chai and Aarthi Ganapathi.

Juanita High School: Garek Chwojko-Frank and Emily Peterson.

Lake Washington High School: Megan LeGresley and Roland Munsil.

Redmond High School: Lila Balakrishnan , Suraj Bhat, Emma Chao, Oleksandra Ianchenko, Kelly Jiang, Kitty Li, Andrew Luo, Katherine Qian, Jonathan Qu, Katharina Schildt and Ryan Thomas.

Tesla STEM High School: Andrew Chronister, Kanaad Deodhar, Maya Ganesan, Jeremy Harrison, Alexander Hoar, Lynsey Liu and Catherine Yao.