A group of hardworking students are competing at the DECA state competition. From Feb. 26 to Feb. 28 they will travel to Greensboro to compete in the DECA state competition. DECA is a club which stands for Distributive Education Clubs of America. The students work very hard to interview, to roleplay, to learn how to talk and to socialize with others, and put in a lot of effort and time to write their papers.

“DECA helps with college readiness because of the interview skills, and it helps when it comes to learning how to interview, speak with adults, step out of your comfort zone and write papers, analyze data, things like that. If you’re doing a written event, it’s going to be a lot more time to commit, but it’s a higher reward,” said junior Salem deVente.

For this competition, students in our school will be participating in roleplay, presentations and written events. For the written events, many students spend weeks writing a long report and come up with a plan to start a new business or find a way to help local businesses get more customers. At the competition, the students hand in these reports to be graded by the experts. 

For the roleplay challenges, students are given a scene and given a problem to solve. Once they are given a scene, the students have 10 minutes to write down a response and ideas. Then they walk into a room and perform the scene with a judge. 

“The time and commitment depends on if you compete or not. So if you’re doing roleplay, that normally takes less time than the others because you’re just practicing by yourself. It would take around two months to properly practice and start to lay it out,” said junior Aakriti Singh. 

Students who earn high enough scores on their written tests and roleplay performances will be seen on stage. If they win, they get to go on a higher competition level in the future to continue their business studies and prepare for future leadership opportunities.