Local students are National Merit semifinalists

Agoura High School has nine students who have been selected as National Merit Scholar semifinalists. Within the Las Virgenes Unified School District, Calabasas High School was next with six. Viewpoint School, a private school in Calabasas, had seven, La Reina, a Catholic high school for girls in Thousand Oaks, had six, and Newbury Park High School in the Conejo Valley Unified School District had two.

Students who take the Pre-Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) and score among the highest in the nation are selected as semifinalists. Later in the year, they become eligible to be selected as a National Merit Scholar finalist qualifying them for a variety of scholarships. This program is run by the College Board, also the publisher of the SAT test.

One Agoura High School student, Vamsidhar Chavakula, registered a perfect score of 80 on all three tests for a combined score of 240.

The other Agoura High students who qualified were: Hannah Glass, Michael Greenbaum, Clarmyra Hayes, David Jacobs, Peter Lai, Mala Mandya, Kaley McMahon and Danielle Ogez.

Semifinalists at Calabasas High School were: Sally Cohen-Cutler, Evan Fisher, Gabriel Messenger, Hana Peters, Erica Shipow and Irene Yoo.