Nonnewaug High School seniors Micah Tracht and Luke Vitalis have been named as Semifinalists in the 70th annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

They join the more than 16,000 semifinalists in the United States who scored in the top 1 percent on their PSAT in their junior year. Tracht and Vitalis are now in the pool to compete for 6,870 National Merit Scholarships worth nearly $26 million that will be awarded in the 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 (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. 

The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest-scoring entrants in each state. The number of Semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.