The Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) is a program that helps students learn new skills and complete projects in which students may get a chance to compete in a state competition for their skills. Sponsors of FBLA Maggie Hansen and Diane Keuth and the president of the FBLA Rileigh Berg all work to make FBLA successful. 

Central recently competed in the virtual state competition. There are four events that take place: role-play, objective, presentation, and prejudged events. In the role-play event, the student is given a situation and has to find a solution to the situation. The presentation event is an event where, in advance, a student creates a presentation of a certain topic and is presented to the judges. The objective event is a 100 question test that the student takes and is judged by their test score. Lastly, the prejudged event is an event that usually has a report that the student creates, which is presented. Due to the pandemic, all of these events will happen virtually over Zoom. 

Hansen says, “Normally, state happens in Springfield from a Thursday evening until the following Saturday afternoon. This year, there are presentations happening on Saturday, March 20th, Saturday, March 27th, and if any events need a second round of presentations, those will happen on Saturday, April 3rd. Students who present won’t find out how they did until Saturday, April 20th.  Testing events, however, always happen in advance so students in those events tested last week and will find out how they did on March 20th.”

Furthermore, COVID-19 affected how the competition will run. Students will have to present through Zoom instead of in-person and that has made it very difficult. 

With 21 students competing, Hansen says, “It has been much harder to meet with students to help them prepare for their events.  It is also different for them to have to present on Zoom to judges, instead of being able to present in person. The students also miss out on the ability to take an overnight trip where they usually network with students from other schools and participate in workshops that allow them to learn new skills.” 

In addition, the state competition has a lot of strong competition, and students are prepared to do the best they can. 

Hansen says, “We are never very confident in who will or will not win at state, as there is a lot of strong competition, but we help prepare our students as best as we can. For FBLA, each individual student or team has potential to win or place at the top of their event. The top four students [or] teams in each event generally qualify to compete at nationals.” According to Hansen, Central regularly has students qualify for nationals too.

In addition to competitions like state, FBLA does much more throughout the year. 

Hansen explains, “FBLA helps students prepare for their future, regardless of if they plan to join the business career field or not.  We do various philanthropy activities, such as our annual Marine Care Packages (which we are going to be doing in the next month or so), or our students’ community service project, which was putting together care packages for children in the county through the organization Project HOPE.” 

Look out for these upcoming philanthropies at Central soon.