Over twenty thousand high school students, advisors, businesspersons, and alumni gathered in Orlando, Florida between April 26th and May 1st for the International Career Development Conference (ICDC), the highest level of DECA competition for the year. Ryan Base, Simmi Mangat, and Hailey Hollerbach placed in the top 10 in the world for their project Suit Up 4 SUDEP in the Community Service Event.

Hailey Hollerbach said, “We came up with the idea for Suit Up 4 SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy) because we wanted to honor JP, a DHS alumnus who passed away from SUDEP, by making our community SUDEP aware. We decided to create a runathon where our school and community could get involved while raise money for the SUDEP institute and JP Memorial Scholarship Fund.”

Varun Shankar, who is a DHS Press staffer, placed in the top ten in one of his role plays in the Sports and Entertainment Marketing Series Event. His two role plays were creating a race track marketing plan and a casino concert marketing plan.

A big honor was the election of Ally Caudill as Virginia DECA’s VP of Hospitality. Caudill said, “My campaign was to increase membership for chapters across Virginia, help Virginia DECA members create plans of action to achieve both community service goals. I also provide DECA members with online competitive event resources.”

Virginia’s twenty-two voting delegates attend ICDC, they vote on the Executive DECA Officer team. State Officers are elected at the state conferences, they have to campaign and the voting delegates vote on the best candidates. Caudill, who is a voting delegate, said, “At ICDC, they [the voting delegates] elect the new Executive DECA Officer team who will represent DECA for the entire world. I interview the candidates and listen to their speeches about during a business session and then I vote on the best one.”

Anthony Eifler was one of the business teachers that went to ICDC with the competing students. He is one of the main sponsors of DECA and he helps mentor the presenting students and gives them advice on how to present to the judges. Eifler said, “We’re very happy with the successes we had this year. Any time that you are recognized on stage at ICDC is a huge accomplishment. For our Community Service group, it was the culmination of a lot of blood, sweat and tears that they put in. We’re excited that they were able to be recognized for all of their hard work. Our school based enterprise [school store] was recognized as Gold Level [the highest level] and we also have a state officer for next year in Ally Caudill, so it was a great year for our DECA program.”

Students who compete for Virginia have to qualify at the State Leadership Conference that occurred last March, the top eight advance to ICDC. They compete with each other to make the top twenty in the preliminary competition. If they make it to the top twenty, the competitors will present again in the finals to place.

The attending students at ICDC were Roshan Baddeliyanage, Ellie Newman, Reyna Tannous, Lily Egenrieder, Tank Jones, Lucas Caldas, Dylan O’Rourke, Hamoodi Estaieyeh, Varun Shakur, Marc Tannous, Devin Granata, Simmi Mangat, Lauren White, Tala Abuhamdeh, Katelyn Gibbs, Rahil Shivjiani, Julia Samaha, Brandon Martinese, Hailey Hollerbach, Jake MacMillan, Katelyn Newell.