Three Cape Hatteras Secondary students move on to International DECA competition

By Mary Ellen Riddle for OuterBanksVoice.com

Three Cape Hatteras Secondary School students in the DECA club were state finalists at a March competition in Greensboro, vying against more than 5,000 students. As a result, they are headed to Anaheim, California this month to compete in the DECA International Career Development Conference Competitive Events program.

Emma Riggs, Ann Lord and Kristin Bennett will be pitted against 2,200 students competing from the USA and eight other countries, says Darren Moore, one of their advisors. The trio competes on Sunday, April 28 and find out if they win on April 30. If they win the preliminaries, they go on to the finals directly. They will learn the outcome that evening.

DECA is a marketing club open to students who take a marketing class, have a certain grade point average and no disciplinary problems. “It’s about character, it’s about, you know, building them up and getting them prepared when they get out of high school,” says Moore. Moore is also the high school marketing teacher and works with Suzanne Jennette, the Career Development Coordinator, who is also a DECA advisor. The club has been in operation at the high school for more than 25 years, says Moore.

There are over 50 distinct categories in which the students can compete, including Community Giving, which is what the three women chose. Inspired by Ann Lord’s personal experience in the foster care system, the students launched a project that found them working with Kelsey Fernandez at the Dare County Department of Social Services and Lord’s parents, whose family cared for a number of foster children over the years. This collaboration helped them produce a list of things foster children in multiple age groups would need when first entering a new foster home.

The project was dear to Lord’s heart. “Well, I was a foster kid myself,” says Lord, who came to the family when she was four and was adopted by them along with three other foster children.

Gaining the public’s help was important to the project, says Riggs. “They could either donate supplies or money and we would use the supplies and money to create starter bags like backpacks for different age groups of children in the foster care system,” she says. “The bags are filled with necessities that they might need when they first enter a foster home because some parents may not be quite prepared because [usually], they’re not told like super far ahead of time.”

The bags were created for three different age categories: Children under two, ages three to 10, and girls ages 11 plus and boys ages 11 plus. They were filled with a variety of goods including towels, blankets, and toiletries.

The trio also created a professional looking “board’ to use in their 15-minute presentation. It included attractive graphics and pictures of the backpacks that they will unpack at the competition. Lord did the design for the board using Canva, a design program.

The project was funded through sponsorships and monetary and in-kind donations from community businesses, a local bake sale and a GoFundMe page. And the Community Giving project was a learning experience for the students.

“I would say that we learned a lot about how to communicate with people in our community, and …show them that we were trustworthy and that there’s a reason that they should like donate, “says Riggs. “We wanted to bring a lot of awareness.”

Through research and interviews, Riggs came away with a more in-depth knowledge of what it is like being a foster child and specifically what it was like for Lord, her DECA teammate.

Bennett learned about how the community and her partners can come together to support a project. “I learned a lot about working in a group setting with these two, and how it’s important to stay on task and be able to have agreements and disagreements and be able to get through those and figure out what works best for all three of us,” she said.

Lord honed her communication and public speaking skills.

In Greensboro, the students were competing with about 30 other state groups in the Community Care category.  Competitors earning first, second and third place honors moved on to the international competition. Hatteras earned third place. This would mark the third year that students from the Hatteras DECA club have advanced to the national level.

Moore says he and Jeannette are immensely proud of the young ladies. “This project is all of their doing,” says Moore. “We have guided them when they have questions, but they have done the work and have worked hard on this project all on their own the past seven months. Their accolades and achievements are a testament to how much the project has meant to them personally as well.”