38 seniors are Merit winners

In all, 38 county residents captured Merit scholarships in 2025, including four 2025 seniors who attended schools located outside the county. Menlo-Atherton High School led all of its peers here with five Merit awardees. Overall, the Sequoia Union High School District, of which M-A is a part, recorded a total of 14 Merit winners, more than any other public high school district in the county this year.

The process to determine Merit scholarship recipients is extensive and rigorous and includes: A junior year preliminary standardized test, overall academic record, extra-curricular activities, leadership positions, an essay, prep honors, school-based recommendations and another standardized test result.

Nationwide, this year’s Merit winners will total over 6,900 students. They will receive just over $26 million worth of scholarship assistance.

The scholarships are funded by corporations, colleges and universities and the Merit program itself — which is based in Illinois and began making awards in 1955.

These are the 2025 San Mateo County National Merit Scholarship recipients and their schools:

Aragon: Charles Birkelund and Andrew Dong.

Burlingame: David Meng and Aaron Peng.

Carlmont: Audrey Clusin, Mason Cao, Mitchell Feldman and Manya Kumar.

Castilleja: Christine Ryu and Diya Verma.

Crystal Springs Uplands: Rohan Dalai, Aidan Mornell and Katherine Yang.

Design Tech: William Berger and Mackenzie Chan.

Harker: Daniel Chen.

Lick-Wilmerding: Saahil Mishra.

Menlo-Atherton: Lilah Chen, William Knox, Samuel Goldman, Anthony Waltz and Benjamin Weiss.

Nueva: Carly Bodnick, Alaric Li, Dylan Pu and Natalie Sepulveda.

Sacred Heart Prep: Megan Newby and Alexis Verner.

San Mateo: Trisha Sabadra.

Sequoia: Christine Chang.

Westmoor: Chloe Chou.

Woodside: Astra Adams, Natalie Arai, Madeline Lee and Kate Stevenson.

Woodside Priory: Andrew Duh, Cole Kawaja and Spencer Ozaki.

If any more local Merit winners are announced on a supplementary list, they will be noted here.

THANK-YOU, LOCAL TAXPAYERS: As two sparkling, new gymnasiums come online at San Mateo and Burlingame high schools this month, it might be a fitting moment to take note of the generosity of the taxpayers of the San Mateo Union High School District.

Those giving individuals, via a spate of bond elections, have been pumping impressive sums of construction dollars into the district’s properties for well over a generation.

In total, the approved bond packages amount to a figure approaching $1 billion when all principal, interest and fees are calculated.

It’s been a fiscal bonanza that has enabled the district — which embraces the communities of San Bruno, Millbrae, Hillsborough, Burlingame, Foster City and San Mateo — to improve, renovate and add new structures and amenities to all of its campuses and central office site.

Separately, an official groundbreaking ceremony (some preliminary work has already been done) for a gymnasium project at Burlingame’s Mercy High School will be held at 10 a.m. Aug. 13 at the all-female Catholic school.

When completed, the gym will be a first on that campus off Adeline Drive. A gymnasium has been a goal at Mercy for decades. Without one, the school’s teams and athletes have been forced to practice off-campus and play all of their contests on the road.

TOO MUCH BAD GIANTS’ NEWS: How depressing has the Giants’ 2025 season become? Last week, in the midst of a grim losing streak that has drastically reduced their Major League Baseball playoff possibilities this late in the current campaign, their Bayside stadium location on the shores of McCovey Cove was part of a tsunami alert. Already underwater in the standings, that was one more negative omen the San Francisco team surely didn’t need.

GOOD LUCK TO THE ALPINE KIDS: On a brighter baseball note, the performance of the Alpine Little League team has been a pleasant diversion from that of the professionals. The 12-year-old kids from the Menlo Park/Portola Valley area are trying to become the first San Mateo County unit to play in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Their exploits continue today in San Bernardino.

TEMBLOR CHUMP CHANGE: A 3.0 earthquake rattled a portion of the New York/New Jersey area last week. The Big Media based there initially went into a mild tizzy. Three-point-zero? Please. A mere seismic belch.