Two students from Bainbridge High School have been named as semifinalists in the 64th annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

The two outstanding Spartans are Ronan Bennett and Marianne Milander.

The pair are both seniors at BHS, and will join other high schoolers from across the country in the competition for some 7,500 National Merit Scholarships worth more than $31 million that will be offered next spring.

More than 1.6 million juniors in about 22,000 high schools entered the 2019 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2017 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, representing less than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state.

Semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay, and earn SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier performance on the qualifying test.