Lake Stevens gets down to business
Lake Stevens High School competes in the annual D.E.C.A. area competition
Nothing but wins: Lake Stevens High School student Wesley Lawson displays his medal from Washington State DECA Area Competition. Many students from Lake Stevens High School placed in the top five for their given event. “In order to win you have to literally be the best in your event, and you have to put in a lot of work and practice in order to be successful. When on stage and you can see how your hard work has paid off, knowing you are among the best, the feeling is unmatched,” senior Wesley Lawson said.
Every school with a DECA program within the country has been preparing for their state’s DECA Area Competition. The same goes for selected schools within Washington state, including Lake Stevens High School giving its students a chance to exercise their business knowledge and skills.
Competition is the highlight of the year for most DECA students, for it’s a chance to show off all they know about business.
“Competition is an opportunity for Business and Marketing students to test their business skills in a variety of events. They can choose to do a roleplay event, where they give business ideas and solutions to a judge along with a hundred multiple-choice test. They have presentation events such as a sales presentation, and lastly, students can choose to do virtual business where they run a business in this online program, kinda like a game,” DECA teacher Karen Morton said.
With the knowledge and skills needed to win competitions, the students attending competitions have been hard at work. The students have been practicing their role-plays, presentations, and running their simulations every day for the last month in preparation.
“We get our performance indicators about a month before the competition, we go off of the indicators we get a month early, we study them and use them to practice our roleplays, or help practice in any event you’re doing, but they mostly help prepare for knowing the prompts and being ready to talk about them,” senior Presley Cole said.
All that hard work and preparation paid off at competition for Lake Stevens High School. When Lake Stevens attended the Area DECA Competition at Glacier Peak High School this year, Lake had multiple students in the top 5 for their categories, allowing them to move on to State competition.
“[Oliver Bashour] and I got first place in our event. We weren’t expecting to win, let alone get first place, but we had a great teacher and practiced a lot for this event, and Lake did great with about 23 or 24 students going on to state,” junior Logan Johnson said.
After all the excitement of the Area Competition, the students are already hard at work, preparing for State in Bellevue this Spring. If the students do just as well at State as they did at Area, then they will be moving on to Nationals in Nashville, Tennessee this year.
