FCCLA Officers Go To State
By: Carson Messick
FCCLA officers are going to state!!!! But wait, do you even know what state means for FCCLA? Do you even know what FCCLA is???!?!?!
For everyone who doesn’t know, FCCLA stands for Family Career Community Leaders of America. This specific club gets involved and helps with the community in many fun and cool ways. The FCCLA officers help plan the events and keep members informed of what's going on, how they can help, and how they can continue volunteering for the community. But the officers do way more than that.
The officers of this club not only plan the meetings and field trips, but they also go and represent the Jenks community in conferences and in a competition known as Star Events. Star Events, which stands for Students Taking Action with Recognition, is an event where officers and members compete against each other to promote the mission of FCCLA: To shine light on the different household roles, community leaders, and wage earners. This event is divided into different categories to help competitors develop life skills in critical thinking, interpersonal communication, character development, and career preparation.
Jenks FCCLA has been competing in Star Events for quite a while, and this year, almost all officers are going to state. The officers have been working on their projects since the beginning of November for this event and have done a very good job at representing Jenks in District and Regionals. The officers competed in three different categories; Focus on the Children, Life Event Planning, and Children’s Literature.
Focus on the Child is a Star Event category where the competitor conducts a child development project that can impact children and the community in some way. The Jenks officers Ashlynn McCoy, Lindsay Sanford, and Madysen Jenkins came together and thought of the idea to go to a 6th grade class here at Jenks and teach children about signs and coping mechanisms of depression and anxiety.
“ We chose to teach 6th graders as it is right before middle school and middle school is around the time I started to see those signs in my friends and people around me,” Junior Ashlynn McCoy, the President of the club here at Jenks said. “We gave them fortune tellers that had coping mechanisms written in them and the teacher wrote a letter telling us how much she had seen a difference.”
McCoy, Sanford, and Jenkins competed against 8 different groups at Regionals and received 2nd place, which advances them to State.
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Life Event Planning is another category in Star Events where competitors take life skills learned in Family and Consumer Science classes in order to plan a life event happening within the next 3 years of one of their lives. Officers Leslie Rodriguez, Sabrina Borjas, and Averie Morton decided to plan Sabrina’s Graduation Party, as Sabrina will be graduating this May.
“ One of the biggest parts of this project was comparing the prices at three different stores and finding the store that gives the best price for the items so we can stay in the budget we had”, treasurer Leslie Rodriguez explained. “We used graphs on our display to show the comparisons and wrote a paper as well talking about our discoveries.”
With all their hard work, Rodriguez, Borjas, and Morton got first place in both District and Regionals and are ready to take on first place at State.
Leslie Rodriguez, Sabrina Borjas, and Averie Morton winning first place at Regionals The last category our very own officers took on is Children’s Literature. In Children’s Literature, the participant is supposed to write a children’s book, read it to a group of children in the selected age range and the book should include an age appropriate topic. Madi Shufeldt not only took on this challenge, but she went above and beyond with this project. Shufeldt wrote amazing book AND illustrated the entire book as well, something that was not in the requirements for this project.
Shufeldt wrote about a monkey named Marcus who was sad as all of his friends are going on vacation and he was stuck at home. His mom helps him learn to use his own imagination to imagine traveling all around the world to different places. Though he stayed at home, Marcus had one of the best vacations ever.
“I have read it to a few classes and I love seeing how excited they get about it. I think it really helps them think creatively and out of the box.” Shufeldt, the Senior representative of this club said. “Kids these days believe you have to have fun by going somewhere. Growing up I stayed home a lot and me and my brother did things like built a fort in the living room or sailed a ship in our tree house and all these other great things and I wanted to share this with other kids.”
Do to Shufeldt artistic abilities and hard work, she had received first place in both District and Regionals and is ready to crush the competition at State.
All three of these wonderful groups have work extremely hard to earn their spots in state and are going to work even harder to get first place and take Jenks FCCLA all the way to Nationals over the summer. With the notes to help tweak their projects to perfection, all three groups are going into State with high confidence. Don’t forget to cheer on these amazing and hard working people as they continue to advance on. Let's go Trojans!