IHS Business Students - World Champions!

Lou DiCesare, Business Education Teacher

May 4, 2009

 

Two Irondequoit High School Business students earned the title of World Champions this past week (Apr. 29-May 3) at the DECA International Career Development Conference (ICDC). Seniors Sam Kennedy and Tyler Condello travelled with six other Irondequoit students to Anaheim, California to compete in a variety of events they qualified for through regional and state competitions.

DECA (www.deca.org) is an association for high school marketing students. Worldwide there are a total of over 180,000 students. The ICDC has over 13,000 student competitors. There are many aspects of DECA, but the main goal is to provide students with an opportunity to learn more about 50 different disciplines within business.

Students choose an area of business that is of interest to them at the start of the school year and study it. Many of the events require students to take a 100 question event-specific test, read a case-study/problem, and present a solution to it in front of a judge who is an industry expert in the field in which the student is competing.

Condello and Kennedy’s (attending Syracuse Univ. and Boston College respectively next year) event though required them to "run" a simulation program of a retail store. All decisions to run a store, including staffing, purchasing, pricing, promotion, location, financial analysis, etc. were required to be made and managed over a 15 minute window against 16 other finalists (http://vbc.knowledgematters.com/vbc/retailing/). These finalists competed on-line during a period of eight weeks to make it to this level. It took five matches of 15 minutes against four teams at a time to finally be crowned – WORLD CHAMPIONS!

With this award also comes a $1000 scholarship sponsored by Safeway Inc. and Knowledgematters Inc. The two team members will split the financial award. Only 50 student teams out of the 180,000 DECA members get to come home with the title World Champions.

Irondequoit seniors Stephanie Beiter (Alfred State) and Jackson Frenzel (Univ. of Buffalo) and Cam White (SUNY Albany) and Max Rick (Bentley Univ.) competed as teams in the Financial Analysis Team Decision Making Event, Junior Barb Bianchi (top 10 medal in role-play #1) in the Business Services Marketing event and sophomore Taylor Diem in the Retail Merchandising event.

Summit FCU, Reliant FCU, WIT FCU, Advantage FCU, Pittsford FCU, Family First FCU  and All State Insurance helped sponsor the cost of the trip for the Irondequoit students.

Students had an opportunity to attend a Dodgers game and take a tour of Hollywood during the evening hours when not in competition. The students were accompanied by advisor and business teacher Lou DiCesare.