DECA is a club in which students learn business skills using real-life scenarios. The club is advised and taught by Kristen Milanovich. This year’s club consists of 33 students. Every year, the Freedom DECA students travel to compete in the district competition with the hopes to qualify for states. Due to COVID-19, this year’s competition looked a little different. The students were given five days, Nov. 30 throughDec. 4, to participate in the competition. The students could complete the competition at any point throughout the week, except when the program was closed from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. during the week. 

The competition is broken into two parts. Part one is a 100 question multiple choice test on a certain business subject. These subjects include marketing, finance, hospitality and tourism and entrepreneurship. Students had 60 minutes to complete this test on their computers. Once the 60 minutes were up, their test would be automatically submitted. If a student tried to change their tab to something other than the test, their test would be automatically submitted no matter where they were in the test.

The second part of the competition is a role-play. In the role-play, students are given a prompt in which they must take a business scenario with a problem that needs to be solved. A solo student is given 15 minutes to brainstorm ideas to fix the problem, and a group is given 10 minutes. The groups are also given certain performance indicators which are business terms that if used correctly during their presentation, could earn them extra points. After the allocated time to prepare with the prompt, the prompt was wiped from the screen meaning the students had to take as many notes as possible to prepare for the presentation. The students were given 60 minutes from the time that the prompt was lifted to record and upload a video of them giving a presentation of the problem they were asked to solve. 

This year, six Freedom students qualified for the state competition. Those students are senior Sunny Taylor, junior Sarah Levenson and sophomores Luke Snavely, Connor Tavern, Erica Rosa and Brandi Bonzo. Junior Josh Pail was also elected District Representative 2 meaning that he will help plan states for the district and will represent the district. Usually, the state competition takes place at Hershey Lodge in Hershey, Pa. However, like the district competition, this year the state competition will also be taking place online. The competition will take place from Jan. 25 to Feb. 1. Much like the district competition, the students will be able to compete any time during that week. The students will compete in states trying to qualify for the national competition which usually takes place in April.