In the last week of April, a group of DACC and Hayes students traveled to Anaheim, California to compete at the national competition for Business Professionals of America (BPA). This competition contains hundreds of categories consisting of design, advertising, videography, etc., all pertaining to business.
Ann Kanning is a business teacher at Hayes who attended the national competition with several students from Hayes.
“Business Professionals of America is a national business organization that wants to encourage leadership skills and independent learning,” Kanning said. “I truly think it is to prepare yourself for graduation and going into college and even getting scholarships.”
This year, Kanning was able to work with her business students, Claire Artemus and Presley Christopher, and helped them qualify for the national competition.
Artemus and Christopher are friends who originally took Kanning’s business class last year so that they could have a class together.
However, they soon realized that they had an interest in BPA, especially while trying to qualify for the next year’s BPA national competition.
“Ms. Kanning made it sound so fun and after seeing that the national competition was in California we decided that we wanted to do this,” Artemus said.
The students started creating their presentation in the first week of the school year.
“Our presentation was on the gig economy and how it could help our community and different businesses around our community,” Christopher said.
Both students had to put in large amounts of effort in order to create their presentation, since they only had a few days a week of allotted class time to complete the monumental task.
“We had to do all of the research and then try to fit the most amount of information in the least amount of time that we could,” Artemus said.
“We practiced a whole lot,” Christopher said. “Once we finished the project it was still every day for 45 minutes rehearsing. We had to make sure that everything was perfect.”
Kanning said she is impressed by the large amount of effort that the girls had to put in.
“They worked on it so much at home and any free moment that we had in class,” she said.
All of their hard work paid off when the pair qualified for nationals, meeting their goal of being able to go to California.
“You can even see it on our faces, I’m pretty sure that we squealed out loud when our names were called,” Artemus said.
Not just Hayes students compete in our region. Junior Josh Emmons, a DACC student, also qualified for the national competition.
“I created a promotional video for the Circleville Pumpkin Show. It was an interview-based video that talked about the festival and asked questions about their favorite food,” Emmons said.
Emmons was able to submit his video and qualified for the national competition in Multimedia.
“It was honestly really surreal. I didn’t really think I was going to make it too far, so it was really exciting when I got the news,” Emmons said.
While both of these projects varied, they still were able to compete in the same competition and learned some life skills.
After such an incredible year at BPA nationals, Emmons, Artemus, and Christopher are excited to expand the program in the future.
“It was so much fun. I totally recommend more people do it because even just going to regionals, even our first time presenting, felt like all of our hard work had paid off,” Artemus said.
As this BPA season comes to an end, the work of these Hayes students at BPA honors is a high accomplishment and deserves recognition.