Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) will compete in its State Career Development Conference March 6-8. The competition is being held at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, rather than Houston, like last year. Hebron DECA has the most state qualifiers from any LISD delegation, with a school-record-breaking 89 competitors.
“We have the largest delegation from LISD going, which we’re very proud of,” DECA president Nisha Pandya said. “We’re telling everyone. It’s honestly such a huge accomplishment.”
DECA competitors can compete in role play or written competitions. The roleplay competition consists of an impromptu scenario that competitors must handle, while the written portion consists of a written report/essay submitted in advance and a presentation given the day of. Depending on the specific event, some competitors must score high enough on a multiple choice question test (MCQ) in order to advance to the next level. DECA’s 89 competitors are made up of 73 role play competitors and 16 written competitors.
“My partner and I, we look at performance indicators — like on Quizlet — and then [we] use DECA+ [to] look at practice role plays and be able to practice the different scenarios,” event coordinator Amy Ngo said. “But this year, we’re focusing heavily on studying for [the] MCQ, because testing is now in-person [and] on paper at state.”
This year, DECA faced a district change due to its original district, district seven, becoming too big and having to split into two separate districts. Now, DECA qualifies under district 12 with the other LISD high schools, alongside newer schools from various school districts.
“When we were part of district seven, we knew the schools that we were competing against — the personalities [and] their overall scores,” Pandya said. “This year, we only knew some of the LISD schools [at the district level meet]. It was definitely difficult figuring out the level of competition that there would have been, just because we didn’t really have any of those statistics for the newer schools.”
Along with the district change, DECA Inc. changed what used to be on-campus testing to on-site testing for the state meet and increased the percentage of how much the MCQ counts toward one’s grade from 50% to 60%.
In addition to those changes, Hebron DECA decided to enforce a new rule this year: a student can only compete with DECA if they are in a career and technical education (CTE) class, but a student must be enrolled in a business-related CTE class to travel. The option of virtual competing, if in any CTE class, is only available this year, as it was meant to help ease the transition from only allowing those in business-related CTE classes from being a part of the club.
“I know [other schools] are still held to the same standard that you have to be in a business class to get LISD to pay for their portion of the travel, but I don’t know how they have applied it,” sponsor Jamie Leonard said. “It was in May that we found out that [this] requirement was coming out from LISD, and so at that point, course selection was done, there was not a lot we could change. In [the summer] we got together with all of our board members so that we could plan the year, and that was when they came up with that idea [that you have to be in a business CTE course.] I just had to pitch it to the district, and they approved it.”
The first day of the three-day state meet consists of an opening ceremony, followed by the competition and testing day. The final day is when the awards ceremony takes place in which students will find out whether or not they qualified for the international meet April 26-29 in Orlando, FL.
“Hebron DECA is one of the biggest [delegations] internationally,” Pandya said. “Being able to compete at that level is such a huge accomplishment — 89 competitors is a huge number. We had over 70% of people qualify. Just being able to have that many seats taken up at state is amazing.”
