On Thursday, February 20th Fair Grove High School students participated at the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) districts at the Seminole Baptist Church in Springfield.

The day started with the opening ceremony, then followed by the interviews and presentations and finally, the award ceremony. 

There were plenty of categories to choose from, each with a hand full of different events. The categories include business management and administration, finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, hospitality and tourism, and personal finance literacy. There are multiple reasons to choose an event, many students choose their events for reasons like it is interest and appealing to them or it applies to their career choices.

 To prepare for their events the students practiced role plays, as well as studying using flashcards and practice tests. Other students had to create and research things to use in their reports and presentations. Autumn Hall (12), DECA president, said “We had weeks of preparation before districts. We wrote our essay then had a week before to prep for our presentation. We just wrote a speech and practiced it over and over again.”

Some students, like David Oplotnik (12) and Travis Reynaud (12), even went to districts with little to no preparation but ‘still ended up doing really well.’ They placed third place in Financial Service Team Decision Making, and will be continuing on to state.

Two other teams will be presuing on to the state competition. Madilyn Barker (12) and Abigail Gilmartin (10) placed third in Marketing Management Team Decision Making. As well as Kennedy Phifer (12) and Halli Phifer (12) placed second in Project Management Business Solutions.

This first round of DECA will be beneficial for the future members and the members who participated. Hall added, “This was our first year with DECA so this year gave us an idea of how districts run and how much more we need to prepare. Hopefully the underclassmen that competed will learn from this year and continue to compete.”