Harboring and fostering the creative potential of its members in subjects such as culinary arts, Interior Design and Fashion Design is what the nonprofit organization Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, or FCCLA, aims to achieve. For a special few, including those who advanced to state after placing at the Texas FCCLA Region V Leadership Conference from Jan. 27 to 29, competitions like these are where they can show this potential. 

Out of the regional competitions, five students made it to state, which will be held from April 9 to 11 in Dallas, Texas. Junior Camden Michalek, who placed second in the Interior Design competition, was given a project where he had to design the interior of a house for a family with special consideration for their son with low-functioning autism.

“There were certain guidelines that had to be followed, like how it had to be a 1500 square ft. house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but there were also more specific requests like a playroom in the garage for their son and designs that accommodated their son’s hypersensitivity,” Michalek said. “It took a lot of research and practice on my end to make sure that my decisions aligned with the requirements of the project, and I’m glad that it paid off in my first ever advancement to state.” 

The project of junior Alexis Adams also involved working with kids – this time, a whole classroom of them in the Ready, Set, Teach competition for which she placed third in. The prompt involved writing a speech regarding her teaching of a second grade class on puppetry and how to use hand puppets, and the style and method of teaching that she used to accomplish this. 

“At first, I was a little shocked,” Adams said. “I didn’t practice nearly as much as I should have with my speech. Now, I am proud to go to state with our chapter president, and I am super proud of the competitors for being brave enough to compete, despite also being a little sad that not everyone in the group was able to make it.” 

It wasn’t just individuals who found success, however. Juniors Taylor Nguyen, Madelyn Roberts and Isabella Swift competed and got second place in the Fashion Design category, where they created the fictional brand, Hollywood Vintage and designed special occasion gowns inspired by vintage Hollywood fashion for events such as prom and black tie events. Like Adams, they also gave an oral presentation regarding each and every detail of Hollywood Vintage’s brand and clothing. 

“Ever since middle school, I’ve always been in art classes and enjoyed different aspects of design, but this was the first ever time I had ever done anything like creating a fashion brand and clothing, let alone for a competition,” Nguyen said. “It was fun brainstorming all of the ideas and crafting a legitimate project using your own creativity and designs. We had to present in front of experienced evaluators while hitting certain Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, standards of fashion design, so while we felt like we did a decent job, we were not at all expecting second place.” 

FCCLA sponsors Katie Travis, Keli Mccabe and Laurel Gressett all coordinated with the competitors to help and give them feedback. Since the projects entered in FCCLA competitions are also required assignments in Family and Consumer Science-related classes, students like Michalek had significant portions of time to work on their project inside and outside of class. However, only a few decided to enter their projects into the district competition.

“Everyone worked very hard to fine-tune their product in time for the competition,” Travis said. “I personally witnessed students like Camden taking out their project nearly every day just to work on various aspects of their plan; where this decoration would go, how to solve this little problem, what kind of style to go for. FCCLA tries to not only foster your skill and creativity for teaching or culinary arts, but also your public speaking and teamwork skills. When students succeed at the holistic set of skills required to go above and beyond in these subjects, it’s something that really shows your potential – these competitions test if you have them.”