On Feb. 11, middle school students from Carmel Middle School and Clay Middle School came to CHS to present their DECA Junior projects. DECA Junior is a new program that helps introduce students to DECA in middle school to better prepare them for the program in high school. It started as a DECA project done by senior Jessica Deady, junior Grace Marchese and junior Anthony Zoccola. According to Chard Reid, CHS DECA leader and business teacher, the first year of DECA Junior has been very successful.
“I thought it was great. I mean 24 students competing the first year…there are a lot of established high school DECA chapters that don’t even have 24 students,” Reid said.
Reid said he has been overseeing the entire project since the beginning, but he has mostly left it up to the students to organize everything. Reid said he wanted to approach the project with hands-off, leaving most of the responsibility to the students.
“My role was just taking it to Mr. Williams and trying to get administrative approval, but Jessica, Grace and Anthony have handled this from start to finish,” Reid said.
According to Marchese, they have been working with the middle school students on their projects since early November.
“Since November, we have gone in every other week for a total of 5 sessions to teach them the basic aspects of business which is marketing, the importance of entrepreneurship, finance, human resource and operations,” Marchese said.
Zoccola said each group of students had to pick out their own business idea and develop it over the five weeks, so that they could present it to them at the high school. A winner is assigned to each grade, then the three grade winners compete for the final prize. Zoccola also said they got a lot of great feedback from the kids.
“We got a lot of positive feedback from the kids and a lot of positive critique, which is really what they are needing at that age and a lot of business education came out of it which is great,” Zoccola said.
With the success of the presentations, Reid said that he is very confident that DECA Junior will continue on next year.
Reid said, “I think it will continue next year as long as students want to run it. I think it’s a great thing, and we have a good sponsor in Mrs. Anderson at the middle schools and I know the principals there were really excited about it.”