8 Loyola Students Named National Merit Semifinalists

Loyola tops the list of local high schools with eight semifinalists named to the National Merit Scholarship Corp.’s 1995 scholarship program. About one-half of 1% of each state’s high school graduating class is represented in the nationwide pool of 15,000 semifinalists announced last week.

Named from Loyola High were Brendan Beer, Christopher Byrnes, Michael Cano, Robert Cuza, Carlos Estrada, James Householder, Joseph Mauch and Anthony McDevitt.

Connie Chung, Elizabeth Grausam, Julianna Mather, Irene Park, Susan Ryan and Kristin Woolley were named from Marlborough.

Two local schools had three semifinalists. Phillip Cooper, John Green and Ann Van were named from Marshall High and Margaret Gilman, Jona-Rose Jaffe and Valerie Levitt from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

Also named were Dong Hong from Bravo Medical Magnet High and Jim Cheng from Lincoln High.

These students have an opportunity to continue in the competition for about 6,700 scholarships, worth more than $26 million, to be awarded next spring.

More than 1 million juniors in about 19,000 high schools entered the 1995 program by taking the 1993 preliminary qualifying test. The highest scores in each state were designated semifinalists in numbers based on each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.