The Future Business Leaders of America, or FBLA, is a  club that is used to get kids involved in business. Bellefonte Area High School’s  FBLA club competed at the Regional Leadership Conference (RLC) last month. During this competition, 22 other schools competed in a variety of FBLA events. 

This year, the students were supposed to have an in-person competition but didn’t due to the weather.

“This year’s RLC was to be held in person. This year it wasn’t COVID that altered our plans – it was the weather. The event was scheduled to start at 10 a.m. and because of the two-hour delay that we had on January 18, it was moved to a virtual format,” Cyber Education Coordinator and FBLA Advisor Mrs. Rebecca Leitzell said.  

To compete in the competition, members of FBLA had the option to choose between a variety of subjects that are split between objective test and performance events. As a result of the variation within events, students have different ways of preparing.

 “Depending on the event that students choose, there is different preparation required for our RLC. Some students choose to take an objective test. They study for that topic test and take the objective exam prior to RLC.  Other students choose performance events,” Mrs. Leitzell said. 

A lot goes in to these performance events, according to Mrs. Leitzell.

“Some of the performance events that students participated in this year were Public Speaking and Broadcast Journalism. For Public Speaking, students had to create a speech pertaining to FBLA goals. For Broadcast Journalism, students had to come up with a newscast with topics assigned to them by FBLA,” she said.

Each student has to do different things to prepare for their event. There are many different events which means everyone will be preparing differently. 

Eleven students  qualified for the State Leadership Conference from Bellefonte Area High School. One of them was senior Ishaan Patel who competed in the entrepreneurship event. Ishaan invested a lot of time preparing for this event. 

“I spent several hours studying different ways businesses can be built, the different types of relationships businesses should have, and many other categories,” he said.  “I was very happy about my placement and I think it reflects the time and effort I put into it.”

Another student who competed at the RLC was junior Noah Abereg, who competed in the business law event. 

“Prior to the test, I studied on Quizlet and did practice tests,” Noah said. 

Bellefonte has many students competing at the State Leadership Conference which is from April 11 to the 13 at the Hershey Lodge in Hershey, PA.