Harvey High School students again earned finalist spots at this summer’s Future Business Leaders of America National Leadership Conference, competing on teams that finished second and fourth in the nation for their categories.
Along with those six students, an eighth-grade student from Painesville’s Heritage Middle School was also named a finalist, said program advisor and Harvey math teacher Michael Wright. In all, the Painesville City School District sent 21 students to the competition in San Antonio, Texas.
To qualify for the national competition, Wright said that students had to finish in the top four of their categories at the state-level competition, which was held in February.
“The state leadership conference, it grows every year, but this year it had over 1,000 competitors, and all the events that we were in had a lot more competition than we’ve had in the past,” he said.
Wright added that this year’s team “really had to kind of fight our way to the top.”
Once they arrived in San Antonio for the national competition, he said the Painesville City students competed against 100 to 150 other teams in their categories from across the nation. Seven students made it out of that preliminary round to the final round, where they competed again with new judges.
One of those students was Jude Cannon, the first-ever Heritage student to make it to the final round. Wright said that Cannon spoke about teen mental health for the Exploring Public Speaking competition, and he placed 11th or 12th in the nation in that category.
Three sophomores on the Introduction to Social Media Strategy team also made it to the final round and finished fourth in their category, Wright said.
“They actually made an Instagram account about mental health tips for teens and talked about the creating of that account and talked about the success and all the different metrics that they used to run a real-life social media campaign,” he said.
Wright said that it was “incredible” that sophomore students placed at nationals.
Meanwhile, he said the two seniors and one junior on the Visual Design team placed second in their category nationally.
“They had to design a booth for FBLA for like an exhibit hall, and they actually created a mascot and created a whole miniature display of what their booth would look like, complete with lights and a plinko board and all kinds of fun things to make it more engaging for anybody that would be in an exhibit hall,” Wright said.
He added that one of the visual design students, Alex Boskovic, was on the school’s FBLA broadcast journalism team last year. That team finished first in the nation.
“He might go down as one of the more decorated FBLA students for sure, nationally…to add to his list of state awards,” Wright said.
He said that the opportunities would not happen without support from Avery Dennison, the Veale Youth Entrepreneurship Forum and a local donor.
“These conferences would cost the students, probably, multiple thousands of dollars to travel on their own just to get into the conference, flights, hotels, everything,” Wright said. “And what we’re able to do is offer these experiences for a small fraction of the cost.”
He added that Avery Dennison also provides mentors for the students.
Besides the competitions, he said the FBLA events also provide students with workshops and networking opportunities. The program also introduces students to different academic and professional experiences.
“If your parents aren’t working a corporate job or if your immediate family members are not doing jobs that you have ever even heard of, then a lot of times you limit yourself to not having access to those or not even knowing they exist, to be honest,” Wright said.
“You kind of limit yourself to what you see,” he added. “So if these kids are seeing all these things, then they’re giving themselves the mentality of, ‘Oh, I can do that.’”
