Two Seniors Named National Merit Semifinalists

Seniors Aero McCormack and Charles Portwood are Fort Worth Country Day’s two National Merit Semifinalists. McCormack and Portwood were honored in front of their peers during Upper School announcements on Wednesday, September 11. They are among 1,714 Semifinalists from Texas and more than 16,000 nationwide. The seniors have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 6,870 National Merit Scholarships worth nearly $26 million that will be offered next spring. 

Over 1.3 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools entered the 2025 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2023 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test., which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing less than 1% of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest-scoring entrants in each state. The number of Semifinalists in the state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.