BOURNE — After being formed just three months ago, the new Bourne High School DECA Chapter saw significant success in its district competition last week.
Bourne High School DECA has 30 founding student members in the chapter and 14 members competed in their first competition at the District 8 Conference at the Emerald Resort and Conference Center in Hyannis on Jan. 4-5.
The high school’s new DECA chapter furthers the efforts of Massachusetts DECA and DECA Inc. at the local level teaching students about marketing, finance, entrepreneurship and business education.
At last week’s conference, Bourne students competed with 650 students from 13 school districts throughout the South Coast region. The Bourne students ranged from freshmen to seniors and competed in the areas of retail, marketing, entrepreneurship, hospitality and finance.
Scoring was based on the results of a written exam and two situational role-plays. Ten of the 14 Bourne DECA members placed in the Top 10 of their category. Sophomore Dhyan Patel placed third overall while earning two second-place finishes in the individual situational role-plays.
Other student results included:
- Emilie Moll and Carley May earned first-place medallions in their second role-play.
- Abdul Bari received a third-place medallion in his first role-play.
- JT Luce received a third-place medallion for his written exam.
- Alexandra Stowe, Michael Pokras, Abdul Bari, Bree Lunedei, Emilie Moll and Carley May all placed seventh overall in their respective categories.
- JT Luce, Peter Scannel and Ryan Witkus all placed in the Top 10 overall in their respective categories.
- Evan Ryll, Muskan Patel, Doug Lunedei and Jonathan Santucci all performed with excellence in their categories as well.
“With our new DECA chapter launching only three months ago, we were thrilled to see so many students who wanted to participate in the District conference. To see them do so well on their first try was absolutely fabulous,” said BHS DECA Advisor Monice Maurice.
Bourne High School DECA will now look toward the Massachusetts DECA State Conference in Boston on March 7-9, where members will join over 2,400 DECA students to compete for the opportunity to represent Massachusetts at the DECA International Career Development Conference (ICDC) in Anaheim, California in April.
Bourne DECA and Advisor Maurice would like to express gratitude to the Grace Swift Nye Grant for its support. The grant is an endowment utilized to enhance the educational offerings for Bourne High School students.
The DECA program will help to compliment the extensive college and career coursework available to students at BHS, specifically the growth of the district’s new Business and Finance Innovation Pathway.
Anyone interested in helping the Bourne High School DECA program either as a business mentor, judge, sponsor, financial partner, etc., is asked to please reach out to Monice Maurice at mmaurice@bourneps.org.
About DECA Inc.
DECA is a career and technical student organization that prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs with a career interest in marketing, finance, hospitality, and management. DECA enhances the preparation for college and careers by providing co-curricular programs that integrate into classroom instruction, apply learning, connect to
business and promote competition. DECA student members leverage their DECA experience to become academically prepared, community oriented, professionally responsible, experienced leaders. DECA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with nearly 250,000 members in 4,000 high school and college chapters in the United States, Canada,
Puerto Rico and Germany.
For more information about DECA, visit www.deca.org.
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