The first weekend in March Riverbend DECA traveled to compete at the annual State Leadership Conference in VA Beach. This year over 3000 students registered to compete in their respective events. “It was really fun, except there were so many people. It’s really hard to qualify when there are several thousand people that are there competing too.” said Riley Calicchia.

Thirteen students from Riverbend qualified for ICDC’s (the International Career Development Conference), and they not only brought more students to compete than any other high school in the county, but had more people qualify for ICDC’s in Atlanta than any other too. Internationals this year are in Atlanta, Georgia from May 3-May 6. Qualifying for ICDC’s is one of the highest honors and biggest achievements a student can obtain through DECA during high school.

For those not in DECA, understanding exactly what students do to compete is somewhat confusing. In an individual event, (ex. Financing, Human Resources, Hotel Management, Quick Serve Management, Apparel and Accessories, Sports and Entertainment Marketing, etc.) a competitor gets a role play that they have never seen before that relates to their event topic. Then, they are given 10 minutes to prepare their role-play to present in front of a judge. Next, they have 10 minutes to present the role-play to a judge and hitting certain performance indicators to be given points. Ms. Collison informs her students before competition that “it is extremely stressful because you cannot really prepare before a competition, because no one knows what role play you will be given. However, no one else knows their topic either, so it everyone is going in equally.” On top of presenting a role-play to a judge, a competitor must also take a written 100 question test. Lastly, the role play and test score are averaged out to give them their overall score.  Overall, the DECA SLC was a success for Riverbend. Students that qualified for Internationals are Morgan King, Lauren Dalfonzo, Brie Boothby, Alicia Majercin, Katherine Johnson, Courtney Brubaker, Katie Hanberry, Jasmine Heyward, Colin Webb, Hope Manninen, Katie Statler, Stephanie Mulligan, Ecstasy Perkins, and Robert Catlett all qualified for ICDC’s in Atlanta.