Junior and DECA president Melissa Su

What is DECA and what do members do in the club?

“As far as DECA as a whole, (DECA) is a competitive business club. For some schools (if they have a chapter), students can either participate in competitive events where they’re focused on writing business-focused papers, or they can do business-focus role plays, where they are given a set amount of time to look over a business scenario and come up with a solution of some type and present it to a judge. There are a couple of events in between there, but that’s basically the bulk of competition itself. So DECA is just really focused on business and competition. At Carmel, we’ve expanded where Carmel DECA is not just focused on competition, it’s more focused on giving students business opportunities as a whole, and that’s why we have the Carmel Cafe and Market, because some of our club members run the cafe and the market and also have other people to delegate work to, so all of that together is just how DECA is helping students, providing them with business opportunities and various tasks to improve their business knowledge.”

What are the changes happening to DECA next year?

“So it was recently announced by our DECA advisers and administration that, starting next year, only students who were in business classes would be able to participate in DECA and it could be IB Business, marketing, just any business department class and as long as they were enrolled they would be allowed to participate. I think my adviser specifically mentioned to me that the change would limit the amount of people in DECA because it is pretty large and there are over 400 members (in DECA) and I think one of the main goals was to reduce the size (of the club).”

Do you think that, because of the change, more students will join business classes?

“I’m honestly not sure and I think it can go both ways. I can see how new members, if they know the requirement, will sign up to take business classes, but I can also see returning members not being able to do DECA anymore because the class wouldn’t fit into their schedule as they had originally planned for so I think it can go both ways.”

Robert Holman, CHS  business teacher and DECA advisor

In what ways has DECA changed since its first chapter at CHS?

“It has grown to be the largest chapter in the state of Indiana.”

What will change about DECA next year and why were these changes made?

“All members for CHS DECA for next year must be enrolled in a business class. For years here at CHS that was the rule.  You had to be in a business class. The last 4 or 5 years we got away from that and allowed students to join that weren’t in a business class. This caused many challenges, including communication. Our club basically became too large to handle. So we are simply going back to the rule that we had before (you have to be in a business class to join DECA).”