CENTRE WELLINGTON – The DECA business club at Centre Wellington District High School (CWDHS) recently qualified for an international competition in California April 25 to May 2.
In order to qualify, the team participated in the Ontario DECA provincials Feb. 9 and 10 in Toronto.
“It’s pretty exciting, it’s a big deal of a competition,” said CWDHS DECA student Kezia Skerritt.
“Getting to go to internationals is just getting more of that business experience, which is exciting.”
DECA, which stands for Distributive Education Clubs of America, is a “business competition club,” explained CWDHS teacher Brenda Pettifer.
Students choose a category and compete regionally and then move up to provincials. They can complete an oral presentation with a case study or a written one and run an event.
Skerritt and fellow DECA team members Paige Pettifer and Isabel Robblee-Brown chose the latter.
“We’re in … project management and career development. So, we were teaching Grade 9 classes about careers in business in agriculture,” said Robblee-Brown.
“We ran a seminar with Ms. Pettifer’s Grade 9 introduction to business class,” added Skerritt.
“We ran four classes over the course of four weeks, and each of us was in charge of a special topic or concept that we had to teach the kids. We did a class on marketing, entrepreneurship, tourism and financing.”
The DECA students focussed on business in agriculture because it made sense in Wellington County.
“We thought that having an agricultural base promotion for careers and business careers in agriculture would help benefit a lot of the kids in the class and a lot of kids outside the class,” said Skerritt.
She added the Ontario curriculum “doesn’t teach agriculture jobs specific to business, so we thought we should try and fix that problem.”
Brenda Pettifer said there are about 10,000 kids “from around the world” coming to compete in nationals, but with all the different categories, she estimated the trio will be going up against about 50 teams.
Judges trim that down to about 10 teams for the championship round and the top three in the final round receive a glass trophy.
“This is a really big accomplishment [and] we’re really thankful for the community support,” said Pettifer.
“We had several businesses, community organizations and agricultural organizations who are financially sponsoring them to help, because it’s a pretty expensive trip, and we’re just really thankful for that.”
