At the end of April, the Hays High School DECA, Distributive Education Club of America, had the opportunity to go to Anaheim, Cal. DECA students who placed at state got the privilege to compete in ICDC, International Career Development Conference. Each group of students had a project that they had to create, organize, execute and present.
Juniors Wyatt Kirkpatrick, Carter Lang and Cooper Lindenmeyer chose finance operations research as their project. Similarly, juniors Cooper Johnson, Truman Johnson and Jaylen Smith chose business operations research as their project. The topic for this year’s project was to create an onboarding and training program to retain employees, and work with a business on how to retain employees.
Kirkpatrick, Lang and Lindenmeyer worked with High Plains Farm Credit for their DECA project, administering and analyzing a survey. They then used the survey results to create a plan to retain employees, along with 20 pages explaining their research.
“My favorite part of the project was learning how companies approach their work environment and employee policies,” Kirkpatrick said.
Cooper Johnson, Truman Johnson and Smith chose to work with Cervs and followed the same procedure as the other group.
Seniors Brenlynn Albers, Abi Banks and Trennedy Woolsey chose the community giving project. They held a clothing drive and were able to help many different communities.
They left for California Friday, April 26. Their first day in Anaheim was spent at Universal Studies, then on Sunday, April 28, they started competing and went to Disneyland afterwards.
Monday, April 29 was their day off, so they went to a shopping outlet and an Angels baseball game. On Tuesday, April 30 in the morning, they had the awards ceremony; although none of them made it to finals, they are waiting on results to see if anyone earned minimum competency.
“It was a really fun experience,” sponsor Shaina Prough said. “It is also really amazing to see 23,000 DECA students compete. Some of the students have never flown or scene the beach before, and it was really cool to also get to experience that with some of them.”
