Saint Stephen’s students made up half of the 10 students from Manatee County named Tuesday as semifinalists in the 2016 National Merit Scholarship program. Seniors Joseph Class, Zackary Gromko, Sabrina Priestly, Hannah Sage, and Michelle Yan advanced to be among a total of 16,000 semifinalists nationally. Finalists will be named in the spring for some 7,400 National Merit Scholarships worth more than $32 million. The process of becoming a semifinalist begins during the junior year of high school when students take the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Those named semifinalists are the highest-scoring entrants in each state — fewer than one-percent of all U.S. high school seniors. About 90-percent of the semifinalists are expected to attain finalist standing, and about half of those will win a National Merit Scholarship.